Whether you’re an SEO working for a client or you have your own business website and want to start applying SEO to get it to the next level in the search engine rankings, keyword research is one of the most important parts of the SEO process. After all, if you are not going after the right keywords from the start, you will just be swimming in the wrong direction.
Some people mistakenly think that this step is simple – all you have to do is come up with a list of keywords that YOU THINK people are searching for and optimize for them. But experienced SEOs know that you really need to do some research on the keywords before you start optimizing
If you’re new to the game (and even if you’re not), here are some tips on how you can do keyword research.
1. Figure out how many keywords you are trying to optimize for
This will depend on your business and the size of your website. If you’re selling just one product and/or have a very small website, perhaps 5-10 keywords is enough. Larger websites with more products/services can try to go after a larger amount of keywords. This number does not have to be set in stone, but it’s a good idea to get a ballpark before you start.
2. Come up with a list of initial keywords that you think are most obvious
Just think what you would search for when looking for your products/services, and try to get as many words as possible. This is where most people would stop with their keyword selection, but it should only be the first step. This is just the start of the list of your potential candidate words, out of which you will eventually select the final keywords to optimize for.
3. See what your site is currently ranking for
SEMRush is a great tool that lets you know which keywords your site is currently ranking for. There are other tools available as well. It’s often easier to get the keywords you already rank for to rank higher than to start from scratch. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start from scratch for new keywords, just that the keywords you’re ranking for should be considered with a higher priority in your final selection process down the line. You may also find some keywords here that you did not think were obvious at first, but would be worthwhile to include in your list of candidates.
4. See what your competitors are ranking for
Figure out who your competitors are (if you don’t know already), and see what they are ranking for. You can use the same SEMRush tool, or search for some keywords to see where they come up. This may give you some further keywords to add to the list of candidates. Try to see what they are and are not ranking for. Sometimes looking for what the competitors are NOT ranking for, can give you an advantage in that field.
5. Use keyword suggestion tools
Now that you have a pretty large list of candidates, it’s time to expand it even further. If you’re shooting for 20 keywords to optimize for, it is not uncommon for your list of POTENTIAL candidates to be upwards of 400 keywords before you pick the final 20.
Some of the most popular keyword suggestion tools are Wordtracker, Google Adwords Tool, SEMRush, SEObook Keyword Suggestion Tool, and the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool (which is based on Wordtracker). You can try any of them to see which you like best.
Wordtracker seems to be the most popular, but I personally like the Google tool the most. It seems to have a higher search threshold than Wordtracker, meaning low volume searched keywords that show up as ‘Not found’ in Wordtracker may still show up with some search volume in Google Tool; thus, the Google tool will still give you suggestions for lower searched keywords.
By using the keyword suggestion tools, you can quickly expand the list of your potential candidates. You should put all the keywords in a spreadsheet for easier tracking.
6. Assign search volume to each keyword
Most of the keyword tools provide the search volume number next to each keyword, but they all use different scales. So you may use different keyword suggestion tools for the keywords, but you should stick to one scale when assigning search volume.
Once again, I personally prefer to use the Google tool. If you do use it, just make sure you use either the Global Monthly Search Volume (if your business is global) or Local Search Volume (if your business is local). But don’t use the Advertiser Competition scale, as that is for paid search.
By assigning search volume to each keyword, and then sorting the keywords by search volume, you can quickly see which keywords are most searched for.
7. Assign relevancy percentages to each keyword
You want to assign a percentage number (0 to 100) to each keyword depending on how relevant that keyword is to your website. Now, this may be a very tricky part and most people don’t do it correctly. Too many people are fooling themselves in assigning 100% to most general keyterms. When you do that, what you’re saying is that 100% of the people searching for this keyword will be interested in your website.
If you are a local body shop in Cleveland, there is no way you are 100% relevant for a general term ‘car repair’. You would only be 100% relevant to a more niche term, such as ‘Cleveland Auto Body Shop’. ‘Car Repair’ would probably get 10%, while ‘Cleveland Car Repair’ would get perhaps 30-50% (if your specialty is only doing body work).
So you really need to ask the question: “What percentage of people who are searching for this keyword are really interested in my website?” and be really honest with the answers. More general and high competitive terms are rarely 100% relevant, since a person searching for a general term is not specific enough, and can be looking for a number of possible uses for that keyword.
If you are an SEO person working for a client, you may ask your client to assign these relevancy percentages to the keywords since they know their business best.
8. Multiply the search volume by the relevancy percentage to get the weighed amount
Now that you have two numbers next to each keyword (Search Volume and Relevancy Percentage), multiply the two numbers to get the third number, which would be the Weighed amount. You can then sort the keywords by that weighed amount to start your final selection process.
When doing the final keyword selection, you should use that Weighed amount only as one of the many factors. Don’t just blindly pick the top 20 keywords off the list.
9. Select the final keywords from the list
Selecting the final keywords may be tricky. What you want to do is keep an eye on the search volume and select a good range of high, mid and low searched keywords.
Here is the thing about High vs. Low searched keywords. Obviously if a keyword has a high search volume it will be much more competitive and harder to rank for. So these keywords are considered “low chance, high reward”: there is a low chance to rank for a highly competitive keyword, but if you do, the rewards are high, so it may still be worth it to include a few of them in your optimization.
Low searched keywords that are 100% relevant can still be very valuable. They are usually easier to rank for, so you can probably get to #1 (or at least top 5) for most of them and thus dominate that low searched niche market. By having many of these low searched keywords which have 100% relevancy at #1, you can still bring in highly targeted traffic to your site, which will convert to sales/revenue.
Depending on your website and industry/competition, your range of high-mid-low keywords may vary. For example, if you’re a new website starting out with not much search history and you’re going for 20 keywords, your realistic spread may be 2 high searched keywords, 6 mid searched keywords, and 12 low searched keywords. For a new site, it would be very hard to get ranked for high searched keywords, so selecting about 2 keywords would be fine.
If you are a larger website with an older domain and are already ranking well for a few terms, your spread may be 5 high searched keywords, 9 mid searched keywords, and 6 low searched keywords. Putting more emphasis on some of the medium searched keywords may work well for you.
If you’re not sure about the history of the site you’re optimizing for, check out my post on 10 Simple Things to Check Before Optimizing an Existing Site.
When you make your final selection from the large list of candidates, here is a recap of the factors you need to keep in mind:
- Search Volume (realistic spread of high, mid and low searched keywords)
- Relevancy and Weighed Amount (all low searched keywords should be 100% relevant, while higher searched terms may not be 100% relevant, but are still important – thus the Weighed amount is a good scale to judge those. Sorting by Weighed amount and going from top to bottom, is a good place to start the selection process)
- Keywords that your site is already ranking for
- Keywords that your competitors are ranking for
Having all these factors in mind you can select the final list of keywords to optimize for.
10. Run those keywords through keyword suggestion tools again
You may think that you’re done, but you should really try to run those final keywords through the keyword suggestion tools again for a couple reasons:
- There may be some new keywords that weren’t on your candidates list which may make more sense.
- You may have made a mistake during the process and have missed some of the most obvious keywords.
Picking the final keywords is a combination of number crunching and common sense. Many non-SEO people will just go with all common sense, while some math-oriented SEOs will go with just numbers and may make a calculation error that will omit some of the most obvious keywords.
Calculating Search Volume, Relevancy and Weighed amount is good, but if a mistake is made (especially during relevancy assignment), it may cost you some of the most valuable keywords. Running the final list of the keywords again through the suggestion tools (as well as double-checking the original keyword candidate list) may bring back some of the most obvious keywords.
So after running the final list against the keyword suggestion tools, you may (or may not) want to revise the final keyword list. Then just look it over to make sure that you have not missed any obvious ones.
11. Keep an eye out on the progress and make keyword changes as necessary
After you start optimizing and have run the SEO campaign for a few months, you may want to revise a few of the keywords on the list depending on the results you’re seeing. You don’t want to make drastic changes (especially if it’s too early), but if you’re seeing that some keywords are not converting well to sales, you may want to substitute them with related keywords to those that are converting well, or experiment with some brand new terms.
Sometimes you may find yourself ranking high for lower-searched terms, but it is not bringing as much traffic or conversions as you hoped it would, so you may need start going after some higher searched volume keywords.
SEO is an ongoing and ever-evolving process, so changing things from time to time is necessary if you want to keep afloat.
The above were just some of the general tips to use during your keyword research. You can certainly develop your own strategies as you dive in to the process. Some unique websites may require more innovative techniques, and no SEO project is usually exactly the same, so use these tips but work in your own keyword selection methods where it makes sense.
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10 Simple (but Important) Things to Check Before Optimizing an Existing Site
Oct 30, 2009 by Victor Murygin | SEOSo you have a website that is not doing too great in the search engines, and you have just now heard of search engine optimization but don’t know where to start. Welcome to the party! Or say you’re an SEO beginner who is taking on some websites to optimize — where should you begin? Here is a basic assessment checklist of what you should investigate about the site before diving in and doing any of the actual work.
1. Check the age of the domain
Why? The older the domain, usually the more authority it has and it has a greater chance to rank higher for the same keywords as a younger domain. If the domain is more than a few years old, you know you’re on a good track and should get results faster than if the domain was just registered.
How? Use whois.sc search or a free quick tool on SEOmoz.
2. Is there a canonical issue with the domain?
Does http://yourdomain.com redirect to http://www.yourdomain.com ?
Why? http://yourdomain.com should always redirect to http://www.yourdomain.com OR the other way around. You don’t want two different domain names (with and without www) to be on your site.
How? Just type in both domain names and see if it redirects. If it does not, you can set up the redirect in your hosting control panel, or do it in .htaccess file depending on the server, or just contact your hosting support/admin and let them know about it, if you’re not technically proficient. You can also set a preference just for Google in your Google Webmaster Central account – but it’s best to set it up on your server to serve all purposes, not just Google.
3. Check for ‘pre-existing’ conditions
Why? You want to see if any previous SEO work has put any kind of hindrance or penalties on the website.
How? If the site has been around for a while, just do a few Google searches for your brand and few of the keywords you SHOULD undoubtedly rank for to see if you do come up as #1 or close to it. That way you can get a quick check how the domain has performed in the past and if it suffered any penalties at all.
4. Is the site search engine friendly?
Why? Obviously, if it is not, it will make your work that much harder and you should look to change it up or rebuild it entirely from scratch.
How? Review the source code of the site. This is the only thing that search engines see. Do you see the content, navigation, links, etc. in the HTML code? If not, there can be multiple explanations:
- Is the site in Flash?
- Does it use frames?
- Does it use javascript for parts of the content or navigation?
Ideally all the text and navigation should be in HTML, and if it’s your site you should really look to change the site structure to HTML/CSS. But if you run into a client or developer who just doesn’t buy it or insists on keeping it the way it is, there are few compromises that you can do:
- For a Flash site, you can suggest to restructure the site as HTML with Flash elements added in to keep the flair they’re looking for.
- Another compromise can be to build the HTML version of the Flash site to run behind the Flash, but that would mean the developer would need to worry about updating and maintaining two separate websites.
- For javascript dropdown navigation, you can use or suggest many free CSS menus that are available online and do pretty much the same thing as JS, but are search engine friendly. Or you can redo the JS navigation where it’s a combination of HTML and javascript, i.e., the URLs are inside the HTML and javascript is only used to move them as needed.
- For other javascript functions that hide the text within javascript from the HTML source, make sure that the actual content/text is within HTML and then you can use javascript to only move/animate that content as needed. But if the content is within javascript, the search engines cannot see it.
- Frames just need to be removed. Nobody uses frames design anymore, and if your site is one of the dinosaurs it just needs to be rebuilt. Having one frame within a page for certain functionality is OK, but I’m talking about if your site is built entirely in frames and you cannot see any content in the source code because of it.
5. Has the site been previously optimized?
Why? If it has, then possibly you will need to do less work. Although, most of the time you would probably still need to redo what was done previously if it was done improperly.
How? Some of the quick things to check for are:
- Title tags – are they different for each page? Do they contain keywords?
- Does a Meta Description exist?
- Is there interlinking within the content of the page that uses keywords?
- Are keywords used at all/enough times within the content of the pages?
- Is there a logical navigation structure that uses keywords?
6. Check the URL structure of the site
Why? The URL Structure must be search engine friendly. Google has a very informative article on the URL structure, which you should follow.
How? Change the URL structure to remove characters such as “?”, “=”, “&”, etc. If you have a dynamic website, make sure a sound URL structure is a requirement from the beginning. You will see many dynamic e-commerce sites use something like this for a product page: domain.com/product.php?id=2343&color=23489. That’s an example of a really bad URL. Instead, use product names and keep the pages as close to the root domain as possible – for example, domain.com/video-games or domain.com/video-games.html. Using keywords inside the URLs can help as well, but it’s best not to make them too long. Also, use dashes “-” to separate the words.
7. Check for broken URLs
Why? Having broken URLs means you’re missing out on link juice or potential traffic. It can also cause confusion from the visitors that may not bother with your site if the URL they clicked on is broken.
How? Register your site in Google Webmaster Central. It’s a good idea to do this anyway to help your site get indexed, so kill two birds with one stone and also use their tools to see if they found any broken URLs. If there are, make sure you 301 redirect those to matching pages or to the homepage.
8. Run a crawl check on the site
Why? Obviously your site needs to be easily crawlable, and there are some great tools available that will give you a quick overview and suggest how to fix issues.
How? You can use Google Webmaster Central to point out any obvious issues. But also there are other tools available that go in deeper: SEOmoz, Raven SEO Tools, and SEO Book have some great tools that will scan your site and will point out anything that may be wrong with it.
9. Run a backlink report
Why? You want to see how many links are pointing back to the site, which anchor keywords are being used, and the quality of the links you’re getting (PageRank, Link Juice, etc.)
How? The quick and free way is to use Yahoo Site Explorer. If you want to a nice report complete with anchor text and/or link juice, you can use the SEOmoz Linkscape, Raven SEO Tools, Majestic-SEO, or some others that are available. I personally like Link Research Tools, which goes really in-depth.
10. See which keywords the site is already ranking for
Why? This should factor in your keyword research. If you’re already ranking on page 2 and 3 for certain keywords, it should be easier to get those keywords to page 1.
How? SEM Rush is a great tool for this. It will show you what you rank for and can suggest keywords that are related. You can also run this report to see what your competitors are ranking for.
The above is just a start-up list of things to do before you even get to some of the more in-depth SEO research, on-site changes and link building, but you should check all these things and MORE, whether you’re starting SEO for your own site or taking on a new project as an SEO.
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Link Building Through Virtual Relationships
Sep 24, 2009 by Greg Finn | Link Building, SEO, Social Media MarketingLast week Jake wrote an awesome post about leveraging relationships for link building and it got me thinking. Seeing that I am a hermit who lives in front of the computer, how the heck do I build links without those daily “real-life” relationships? Well, believe it or not, I do actively build links with relationships without meeting people in the flesh and wanted to share some of my tips and tricks for doing this across my social media networks.
The main thing to remember is that if you are helpful and can provide value to someone else, it is basically a virtual handshake and a way to fire up your virtual relationship. Simple things like a vote, comment, retweet or even just praise can strengthen your relationship. Here are a few things to do to meet people in Social Media, and turn them into friends (who can help you build links).
Make it Easy for People to Contact You
Put your instant messaging name up on all of your social profiles so that you can connect. Internal messaging on many social sites is lackluster, and getting someone’s IM name can allow you to get in touch when you need to. A few tips for messaging would be to create a separate account for your “public IM name” so you won’t overload your personal account with voting/favor requests. Also, create an account on all of the main messaging platforms. Many people prefer using Gmail over AIM, or Yahoo! over Gmail, so set it all up and use a service like digsby or pidgin to neatly manage it.
Many times you can instantly help your friends by giving votes which will go a long way when you need a favor. People who are asking for votes/re-tweets/comments probably have a website that they are promoting – and guess what? If you have a good relationship, you now have a friend on IM that you can use if you are looking for a link!
Allow People to Easily Find You
So now we see the power of people who are actively promoting social media content, and how targeted they can be for links. To expand your networks, make it simple for people to find you across all social networks. Place your Digg profile link in your StumbleUpon profile description, and include your Twitter account in your Digg profile. The more places where people can find you, the more relationships you are going to build. Also, having the ability to help people across multiple sites will just add to your cause when asking for a link.
Act Like You Would in Real Life
When a person finds your IM name from a social network, many times they “say hi” by sending you a link in which you should vote on. This is one of the things that amazes me on a daily basis. I rarely meet any people who try to get something from me without even saying hello. When contacting people, you should try to really connect with them. Say you met someone from StumbleUpon, subscribe to their favorites and let them know when you really liked a story that they found. Find out where they live, what their name is, see what they like; basically, you should act like a human to them and you will work your way to a real relationship! The more information you have on someone, the more you can help them, and in turn, the more you can ask from them.
All-in-all, while I might not have as many “real life” relationships as Jake, I have found ways to acquire links while using social media and building my networks. To me, the biggest benefit of these virtual relationships is that the people you will meet will have a high probability of having a website where they could link to you, and you can easily help them to start a positive relationship. So even if you don’t have a wealth of personal connections offline, don’t fret! These tips should hopefully help you reach your link building goals!
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Ah, relationships. Good relationships are strong, meaningful bonds that act to hold people or objects together. Like the furniture maker’s forgotten “dovetail” joint that once held a strong piece of furniture together and is now replaced with weak staples between faux wood fiberboard, relationships seem to be the forgotten glue that once held the business world together. Oh relationships, where have you gone?
Actually, relationships are alive and well, out there, calling your name with opportunities awaiting just beyond that first handshake. And why do we love relationships? Relationships lead to links online! Some of the best links that a business can acquire to their website are those developed through real-life relationships.
The best advice to grab these links is to get out from behind that keyboard and monitor (don’t worry, you can take your iPhone or BlackBerry with you) and go meet some real PEOPLE.
By meeting people and developing real relationships with them, you have the opportunity to garner quality links to your website. If you’re networking in the right places, these links are often targeted and of relative high value for SEO and for traffic purposes.
What do we mean by “real-life” relationships? These are relationships with people that you’ve spoken to on the telephone or have met in person. These are actual people you’ve developed a rapport with at some point at an event or in online social networking.
How does one go about garnering links from real life relationships?
First, you need to initiate or develop the relationship:
- Start by attending industry conferences and social events. Those who you meet at industry conferences, if you have a similar philosophy, will allow you to link to them and visa versa. The great thing about industry conferences is that you meet targeted prospects for link opportunities. Sometimes there are dot-org (.org) website owners who run trade or industry sites and are willing to link to you. We all love .orgs, don’t we, for many of them are trustworthy and non-commercial in nature.
- If you’re not able to afford major industry conferences, it’s helpful to look for local networking groups and informal gatherings within your industry. It doesn’t have to be a huge once-annual event to attract a strong, focused group of attendees.
- Within industry magazines, find vendors who are offering related products but aren’t direct competitors. Approach them and let them know that they have an opportunity with you.
- Within industry trade journals, find other businesses and organizations that you can call on to work up a relationship. Offer up lunch in your neighborhood and then discuss with them your online opportunities.
- Look to your local Chamber of Commerce, get involved and become active as a volunteer / member. Make sure to get some linking going from the Chamber website.
- Use online social networking sites like Meetup.com, LinkedIn.com and even Twitter.com to network with users who have like-minded interests. The search features in these sites are solid and can lead you to some of the most valuable relationships anywhere.
- Visit targeted users’ websites from their profiles to see if they could be a good linking candidate.
- Find local MeetUp groups with people who are interested in like-minded topics or even topics that are slightly related. For example, if you’re in the art-supply business, find a MeetUp of artists such as photographers, painters and/or sculptors. Attend the MeetUp, be friendly and good things will happen.
- Twitter can be a great resource for finding links because the search is efficient, targeted, pretty much real time, and the initial pitch only has to be 140 characters in a direct message!
Once you’ve established a relationship, simply brief the target linker on the potential of the relationship. If you think it’s a good linking partner based on audiences (and not solely on SEO weighting), chances are this is a very easy pitch and beneficial to both parties. Engage and see if there can be a meaningful way to share information between sites and help each other out in whatever form would work for both parties.
Granted, in a fair amount of cases you may end up with reciprocal relationships, but a targeted and natural-looking reciprocal link may be better than no link at all, both for SEO purposes and for actual traffic over time! In many cases too there are simple, overlooked opportunities to garner one-way links directly back to your site and content.
Linking is a cumulative effort. Don’t expect to get hundreds of links overnight from this method. This is an organic, methodical process and not one which will bounce you to page #1 for all of your target or most competitive keywords in a day, or even a week. BUT, if you start out and say to yourself, “I’m going to garner quality, meaningful links over the course of time through hard work” - and set your goals to do so – it will happen. If you take the opportunity to ask for a link from most encounters and relationships you develop in your industry, good things will happen.
Relying on real-world networking, going out and pressing the flesh and meeting people in your industry (both at events and in online social networking websites) allows you to start on this path of natural linking success. You’ll find that your business “dovetails” with some of the best places on the Internet!
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Savvy Internet marketers know the importance of keyword targeting for ranking and usability, but as a refresher (and for you beginners out there) I thought I’d run down a list of various areas on the page where you can include your core keyword. It’s not a completely comprehensive list and I’m not going to bother with percentage of importance or how crucial it is to target these particular spots — this is just my opinion of areas to be mindful of and possibly include a keyword if you can, because it can potentially help with rankings and should provide a solid user experience. I’ll use “vintage clothes” as an example — it’s a pretty competitive term and currently has nearly 33 million search results.
Title Tag
I’d have the keyword first or close to the beginning of the title tag and keep the tag to about 65-70 characters so the entire tag can display in search results.
<title>Vintage Clothes, Indie Clothing and Great Styles | HipstersRUs.com</title>
Meta Description
While the meta description isn’t much of a ranking factor, it’s still a good place to include your keywords because search engines will bold the terms the user searched for, and if those terms are in your meta description they’ll help draw the user’s eyes to your search result. You can dynamically generate meta descriptions (for example, if you have an e-commerce site with millions of products and want to automatically generate descriptions for individual product pages) or leave them blank and let search engines pull what they feel is a relevant description for the page, but I think that if you can write up a meta description for certain core pages (e.g., the home page, your blog page, contact page, etc), you should control how those pages are being described to searchers.
Think of your meta description as an advertisement for your page — how will you craft it in order to entice a searcher to click on your result over 9 others being displayed? Make your description readable (don’t just list keywords one after another; they won’t help your rankings, anyway) and keep it to about 155 to 170 characters to avoid it getting cut off in the search results.
<meta name=”description” content=”HipstersRUs offers hip vintage clothes and indie-style clothing in impeccable quality and at affordable prices. We have great styles of vintage clothing in mint condition.”>
URL
It’s nice to have the keyword in your main URL if possible. Redwidgets.com is better for ranking than SpunkyMonkey.com, a brand that specializes in red widgets. Some engines seem to assign a bit of weight to keyword-centric URLs but even if they don’t (or claim not to), a URL with a keyword in it will probably get more keyword-centric anchor text than the brand would. If I linked to redwidgets.com and SpunkyMonkey.com using their URLs as the anchor text, redwidgets.com would likely have the edge in ranking for “red widgets” than SpunkyMonkey because the keyword’s already built into the anchor text.
That being said, if you’re building a brand and don’t have the keyword in your main URL but still want to rank for certain keywords, you can still have optimized URLs. For example:
http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-accessories
http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-dresses
http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-suits
You could potentially have a URL that’s hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing but that has its upsides and its downsides. One negative is that you’re possibly pitting two pages against each other, which we in the biz affectionately refer to as keyword cannibalization. If you have multiple pages that appear to target the same keyword (via duplicate title tags, thoughtless keyword repetition, similar URLs, etc), you’re forcing the search engines to choose what they feel is the most relevant page to display as a result for that keyword, and the downside is that what they choose may not be the page that you want ranking. You wouldn’t want to have something like hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing, hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing-1, hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing-2, etc, and attempt to rank all of them for the term “vintage clothing.”
However, if your home page is ranking for “vintage clothing” and you also have a page that talks about vintage clothing in some regard (maybe it’s a page of newly arrived clothing or you talk about where you acquire your vintage clothing), you could end up ranking both pages for that keyword — your home page as a top result and the vintage clothing page as an indented result. You’re occupying more search result real estate with your brand, which is great for your business.
Here’s a search result for “books”:
Amazon has two pages ranking for “books,” their books page and the home page. I mostly see indented results occur with the home page and a secondary page, so if you make certain that both pages aren’t exact dupes of each other and have unique content, you might end up ranking both for the same keyword.
Header Tag
There’s been talk that using keywords in your H1 tag used to be a bigger ranking factor but is now waning in importance from a pure ranking standpoint. However, I still think it’s a best practice to include your keyword in your header tags, if not for ranking reasons then at least for usability. If someone searched for “vintage clothing” and clicked on your result, they’ll probably expect to see the keyword they searched for on the page in some form or another. Header tags operate the same way as a standard outline, so just use them the same way. For example:
<h1>Widgets</h1>
yada yada yada
<h2>Red Widgets</h2>
yada yada yada
<h3>Sparkley Red Widgets</h3>
yada yada yada
<h3>Striped Red Widgets</h3>
yada yada yada
<h2>Blue Widgets</h2>
And so on. For our vintage clothing example, the following would be a good H1 tag for the home page:
<h1>Vintage Clothing at HipstersRUs.com</h1>
Body of Text
Don’t get all aggro and obsessed with keyword density and think, “Derr, I have to have a density of 23.78% in order to rank #1 for my keyword.” Just write natural copy and use your keyword where it makes sense. Be mindful but logical — if you have a page that repeats your keyword over and over again, users are going to wonder what the hell is wrong with you and a human editor might think you’re trying to spam your way into the SERPs.
Which reads better?
Vintage clothing at HipstersRUs.com. Vintage clothes men’s vintage suits women’s vintage dresses and great vintage styles. Our vintage clothes are affordable and stylish. We offer free shipping on vintage clothing orders over $50. Vintage clothes in great shape and styles.
Or this:
At HipstersRUs we offer stylish vintage clothing at affordable prices. Fashion trends come and go, but classic vintage looks always stand out. From the essential black dress to a sharp three-piece suit, we’ve got all sorts of vintage styles and clothes that look great without breaking the bank. Complete your outfit with HipstersRUs!
Internal Anchor Text
If you’ve got a page that you’re trying to rank for “red widgets,” it makes sense to link to it internally using “red widgets” as the anchor text instead of “here” or something of equally low value. Be mindful of how you link to pages in your navigation, via breadcrumbs, and contextually. For example, if HipstersRUs.com has a page that’s targeting “vintage dresses,” they’d obviously want to link to it whenever they mention the page using “vintage dresses” in their navigation, in blog posts, etc.
External Anchor Text
As with internal linking, you’ll want to have optimized anchor text for any links pointing to you from other web pages. Unfortunately, unlike internal linking you often don’t have control over how someone links to you (which is why, as previously mentioned, it is nice to have your keyword built into your main URL if you can). If someone’s linked to you using a less than ideal anchor text, you can try and contact that person and say that you appreciate the link and was wondering if he/she can change the anchor text for you. If you have any control of the link whatsoever, be sure to incorporate your keywords in the anchor text.
Ex. “I bought a super cute dress at HipstersRUs.com, which sells tons of vintage clothing.”
Social Networking Profiles
Another possible strategy is to include your keyword in your social profiles. While this won’t help your main page rank, I think it’s great to associate the brand with that keyword so that people associate the two with each other.
For example, if HipstersRUs.com had a Twitter profile, they could register “hipstersRus” as the URL but optimize the display name:
Twitter seems to limit names to about 20 characters, so you might need to be a bit creative. You could go with HipstersRUs or try to target keywords (in the above example, I went with “Hip Vintage Clothing”). In the description hit up the brand and your keyword within 160 characters (just like you would a meta description):
HipstersRUs is an online vintage clothing store specializing in vintage looks, styles & accessories at affordable prices. Our vintage clothes are chic and hip!
Try to work in the keyword if you build a custom Twitter background that includes contact info too.
With Facebook, you could create a page called “HipstersRUs Vintage Clothes”:
Target the keyword in your page description and when you post notes. Like I said, although this doesn’t have a primary effect on your page rankings, you’re branding yourself and strengthening the association between your brand and that particular keyword; that way, if someone later does a search for “vintage clothing” and sees your page in the search results (whether you’re in position #1, 4, or 10), she might recall your social media profile and may click on your result. Reinforcing the keyword continues to strengthen that bond so that when the person hears “vintage clothing,” they’ll think “HipstersRUs,” and vice versa.
Obviously, with all of the above strategies the most important thing is to be logical with how you use the keyword. You’re optimizing not just for search engines, but for your users too, and it’s better to be user-friendly than to be solely search-engine friendly. Thus, you want to be sensible, smart and strategic (none of this Malkovich Malkovich nonsense).
Here’s where I turn it over to you — how do you target your keywords? If I’ve missed any tactics or strategies, please share them in the comments below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow 10e20 on Twitter. 
Integrating Flash into an HTML Site in an SEO Friendly Way
Jul 31, 2009 by Victor Murygin | Design, SEO, Web Development
Flash websites have been the fear of SEOs since the inception. Many of us have to constantly battle clients who want a pretty flash website and don’t want to understand the technical jibber jabber about why it’s not good for search engines. We try to explain as best as we can why “Flash sucks,” and why you should stick to HTML sites. But ultimately you can expect them to win with a simple argument: “But it looks so pretty.”
The truth is, there are some businesses that can benefit from a great visual presentation that a simple HTML site cannot give. If your niche is a high valued clientele, or you have a website that sells art or some other product that needs a great visual presentation, then getting a visually stunning site may be the priority. In the real world people do like pretty things that move.
There is a compromise that can be reached between Flash and SEO. The myth that anything flash is bad has to be broken. What is truly bad for SEO is a website that consists entirely of one Flash file. But if you’re a skillful developer who has SEO on his mind AND must meet the client’s demands for a visually stunning animated site, you can solve this by creating an HTML site and strategically integrating Flash files as well as aesthetic imagery into the site.
And if you already have an all Flash site, in most cases you can recreate the exact same thing with an HTML/Flash combination, and in others it would just take some design changes to achieve the goal.
Here are a few website examples that combine Flash and HTML into visually appealing sites that are also SEO-friendly.
Northside Piers
Visual Adventures
Le Camp
The above are just a few examples of the techniques. They may not be appealing to all, but with a skillful designer/developer, the possibilities can be endless.
Here is a list of things to keep in mind for the developer, whether you’re creating a new HTML/Flash site or trying to fix the mistakes of the past by redoing an all-Flash website:
- Create the navigation in HTML/CSS with real HTML URLs for each page (unlike in Flash where the whole website is on one page). There are plenty of free HTML/CSS navigational menus available on the web.
- Have all the text in HTML/CSS on all pages (not within Flash files).
- Place all the cool looking animations in Flash strategically throughout the HTML website so that it is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site. Thus, instead of the whole website in one Flash file, you will have several Flash animations placed inside the HTML pages.
- Use images and backgrounds creatively to visually fill in any disconnect between Flash and HTML. If you do this right, most of the casual users won’t be able to tell a difference nor will they care.
- Javascript can also be used to move, hide or show navigation or sections of text, and many Flash sites use this technique. However, an important note here is that Javascript should ONLY be used to move the existing HTML sections. The text itself, as well as navigation and other links, should be in HTML so that they are visible in the source code (and thus read by search engines). If you hide the text and navigation within the Javascript, the search engines will not be able to read them and we are back at the same problem as we had with Flash.
Now, it may take a bit more time, and thus more budget to create separate Flash files, HTML and Javascript tricks. But if you’re a business that caters to high-end clientele and can afford it, the benefits should be greater than just an all-in-one Flash site.
After all, what’s the point of having the best looking site if nobody can find it?
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Social Media Marketing is NOT a Direct Response Channel
Apr 4, 2008 by Jake Matthews | SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social NetworksFrequently I speak with Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s), Business Development Specialists, Product and Brand Managers regarding Social Media engagements and they always ask: “How many customers am I going to get directly from my Social Campaigns? What’s going to be my CPA, my ROI and my ROAS? What Immediate sales
will I get?†To this I respectfully respond: “Stop! Don’t look at Social as a direct response marketing channel.†These marketers often react in shock with a quizzical twist because they are used to hearing what they want which is: “Hey, all of our programs are going to get you crazy, mad sales dude, right away – mate.”
Why do I disillusion these Marketing officers at the risk of them not being interested in engaging social communities? I tell them this because Social Media is simply not a channel to look at every small user action as it relates to specific return on every dollar spent. It’s not Direct Response (DR). In many ways, it may not even be an outright “media buy”. With Social it may be important to discard concepts of CPA and traffic and other media buying models. Why?
Events in Social spheres are sometimes tough to track and tie-back, but more importantly, Social is not about individual sales nor is it about the individual. It’s about creating groups and momentous group action – to move the tide and let the waves grace your shores. The return will always be there if you approach your campaigns in a well planned manner and with the right intentions. The sales will come from connection, association, buzz, referral, love and fuzzy feelings of your brand, and lifetime value of clients. It’s a bit about buzz, a bit about brand loyalty, some SEO, and a whole lot about reputation management.
It is true that Marketers (including, Your’s Truly) are able measure specific actions taken by users in the Social Media sphere. There are plenty of products, methods analytics software and tools to handle events and actions on-line, but currently no one single tool is really able to tell you down to a CPA basis what a Social Media campaign is going to deliver. Tying it all together can be more expensive (and expansive) than the campaign itself.
So mostly, I tell my CMO buddies, it’s time to start thinking about Social from the point of view of connecting with the community and reaching out to start new conversations or join existing conversations taking place on the Internet. This is scalable, it has return on investment and you shouldn’t fear it. Just don’t look at it as buying traffic or buying sales; It’s NOT.
If you are after the CPA model, stick with your PPC, CPM and affiliate work. Social is not about “buying traffic†or “H.I.T.S.”(How Idiots Track Statistics) to your website. Social is not about making people click your BUY NOW buttons on the first go-round.
Social is about the knock-on positive, long-lasting, organic/SEO, bookmarking, tagging, forwarding, viral sharing, brand, search and actual social benefits. It’s about the consistent long term placement of your brand(s). Social is maintaining your brand and your reputation. In its best form it multiplies over time with compound growth. It’s all about acting like a human and networking in it’s traditional form; being a part of the discourse, part of the conversation, meeting people and not sucking people into an E-commerce funnel. In Social, it’s the shared experience among groups and audiences that provides value to your bottom line.
Others who’ve discussed the subject elsewhere are Hollis Thomases at ClickZ and Marc Meyer at Emerson Direct.
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Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers
Feb 13, 2008 by Shannon Bowden | Coverage, Pay Per Click, SEO
Yesterday, Chris Sherman from Search Marketing Now presented another webinar jammed packed with useful information. This session entitled ‘Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers‘ was sponsored by iProspect and moderated by Claire Schoen.
Chris was a perfect speaker due to his experience covering search and search engines since 1994. He is the author of several books, including ‘Google Power’.
Chris started out the presentation by outlining that he’ll cover why we might want to go global, what types of campaigns work best and how to do it.
The first slide discussed the fact that a lot of people perceive that Google has taken over the earth. Yes, Google is dominant and if you are running a search marketing campaign, you understand that Google’s reach can give you that global coverage. Chris said we may ask ourselves why should we should bother going multinational since Google has a global reach. But, Chris believes there are other opportunities out there.
comScore does a monthly report on worldwide search share. Google does have the dominant share – about 63% – that’s just under 2/3 of all the market share worldwide. Despite the all the media about the Yahoo/Microsoft merge, the reality is that Yahoo worldwide, they are number one in terms of the number of people who visit them. In terms of search – they are number 2. If you aren’t using Yahoo, you could be missing out on certain benefits – particularly worldwide.
The number 3 player is Baidu.com – they are the dominant player in China. Over time as the Internet expands in China, Chris believes those numbers for Baidu will go in the double digits very quickly.
There is a tie for number 4 – Microsoft sites and NHN Corp. Finally, the other 90+ search engines have a 13% market share. If you actually start drilling down you’ll find some of these players are dominant in certain regions.
- Google totally dominates North America and most of Europe.
- Yahoo is dominant in Asia, except for:
- China (Baidu 61%, Google 20%)
- South Korea (Naver 74%, Google 4%)
- Russia (RIndex 57%, Google 23%)
Almost 1/6 of the population is out there searching and doing about 61 billion searches per month. If you drill down, 75% of all searches are outside North America. To Chris, that is the most compelling reason you want to consider doing a multinational search marketing campaign.
Chris posed the big question…‘do we have to go through the details of translating?’
- Depends on your goals. You can have a strictly English campaign and it will work best for global brands and products with the same name in all cultures.
- An alternative is to mix campaigns that mix and match English and target market language (keywords, ads, creative landing pages, etc). Takes a bit of experimenting to discover what works best with this mixed approach.
- Varies from country to country.
- Chris discussed how people use different search terms, have different eye tracking, and result scanning patterns, different click through styles. Studies have proven the differences between North American searchers and others – like those from China.
- This means you will likely need to do translation, search optimization and cultural optimization. You need to make your content appealing to the search engines and the searchers through their various needs that they are expressing through their search behaviour.
- Chris counseled us that if we are going multinational, we will have to commit a reasonable amount of resources to ensure the campaign is successful. Even before we being, we should consider whether a paid search or natural search campaign is more likely to be effective in a given market.
- Sherman feels that in larger markets – you are probably o.k. to do either – or both if you have the resources.
- However, for smaller markets, you should consider each individually. (In smaller countries where you could be targeting the millions or hundreds of thousand of people – you need to carefully consider who is the market leader in those countries).
- Use your marketing department to carefully weigh the probability of ranking with both country size and internet reach. Remember that Internet reach varies greatly (example, China is under 20% while other countries have much greater Internet reach – but with a smaller population).
- Do you have sales and logistics resources in a market? May not need them and may be able to successfully do it all online, but if you can’t you need to have the resources in place.
- Are we able to handle shipping, different currencies, duties and taxes?
- What about support? Do our support people speak the language? People may want to call or send an email. Do we have the people in place to handle this?
All of these things will impact whether the search marketing campaign can be successful.
- First thing is to find good translators
- Must know local idioms (need to understand the local dialect, terms etc).
- Must be able to translate unique or technical terms for your product, service or brand
- Translate text, images and navigation. A lot of people overlook translating images and navigation – you need to make the user experience rock solid.
- Crucial – Make sure SEO is involved from the beginning. Don’t want to do SEO as an afterthought – get them involved right from beginning so that you’ll end up with a more effective website and the SEO specialists can help you avoid potentially costly mistakes.
- Chris warned us that English content that’s optimized does not automatically become search friendly when translated. Translation is an art and may alter the content in such as way that it doesn’t rank well at all in your target market.
- Similarly, you can’t simply translate English PPC ads and landing pages.
- Tip: Translate your keyword list first, before any other content. Get a good sense of those critical keywords that you are hoping to capture with the searchers.
- The long tail means targeting less common keywords or phrases – that long tail exists in all other languages but it is not the same in all other languages.
- Romance language searches tend to use fewer, more common words.
- English & Dutch/German searchers tend to use more terms and less common terms. Right now, long tail will probably be more effective in those languages.
- Paradox? In the UK – nine keywords account for 5% of all searches.
- Chris said he is often questioned about duplicate content in multinational campaigns. If you have the same language content on multiple servers in different countries, you may be subject to duplicate content penalties. Be aware, but don’t necessarily be alarmed. They may only be trying to find the main source of your content, regardless of where you are located in the world. However, if you are finding that search engines are getting confused, you may need to do some work changing content, or putting it into other formats etc. Really boils down to your individual situation.
- Content translated into different languages and hosted in different countries is not duplicate content to search engines (at least today…) May change but today isn’t a concern.
What should the right domain be – a dot.com or a country specific domain?
- Boils down to your intent. If possible, go for both – especially for companies trying to target regions with regional pride, you will want to go for country specific domain.
- For example, IBM has one global website, with subdomains for individual countries.
- Sony, by contrast has local domains in all countries.
- Be careful of those ‘choose your country’ top level pages! If you have a dot.com and are going to redirect to another country – don’t make those pages search engine hostile! You want the search engine to be able to find the country specific domains. Make sure navigation on homepage – no matter what you do with it -better not block the crawlers from finding the content on all the different websites you create.
IP Address gives the physical location of where the server is based.
- Chris said he has found that when search engines are ranking content, they will look at the IP address to decide whether it should give more weight in country specific results to sites with local IP addresses.
- Challenge: legal or residency requirements in some countries. In some cases, you may need to prove you have some legal presence in that country before you can get a local IP address.
- Google’s webmaster tools allow you to specify country, and Microsoft says this capability is coming.
- Localized links are crucial when you are going into a multinational campaign. It is not enough to translate and set up a site in a different country.
- As with any site, it needs links pointing to it to rank well in search engines.
- And most of these links need to come from local authority sites, not from the mother ship or out of country sites.
- Can be the most cost effective way to have multinational reach.
- Geotargeting can be very precise.
- Translate both ads and landing pages.
- Use PPC as a research tool to help identify most effective keywords in a specific language/country.
- For global brands in multiple countries, Chris suggested we trust the offline brand experts here.
- Some cultures like and accept global brands (ex. China) – others prefer homegrown, localized brands.
- Especially important – emphasizing brand attributes in a culturally appropriate way. You have to be sensitive to that and don’t neglect images!
- PDF report ‘Global Search Report 2007′ by einternet is available online and has a wealth of information.
- Ex. China is on track to become the number one in terms of searches on the Internet but they have a low penetration of the population. Conversely, Denmark has 70% penetration and there is another search engine beyond Google that is popular. Report is full of good information that can help companies choose smaller markets.
- Chris concluded by stating that multinational search marketing offers a very appealing way to reach more customers, but it is not for everybody.
- Success requires deep, localized knowledge of markets. If you don’t have that knowledge, you need to reach out to a partner that has that knowledge.
- Campaigns must be optimized and tailored for both language and culture. Not enough just to take optimized content, translate, and expect it to work in another country. Have to tailor that information for the language and culture you are trying to target.
After this very informative presentation, there were a few minutes for questions.
How would we find out about legal residency requirements? – If you are trying to establish a site in a specific country, the hosts in that country will spell out what is require. For example, in Australia you need an Australia Business Number. Go directly to a particular host based in a country and find out the requirements that are necessary to actually register a site there.
How do you find translating services in a specific country? You can go on the web and find translation services, the key there is to get a translation service that can also work with an optimizer. The best thing to do is seek out a local SEM firm or a global SEM firm and see what they can do because they are probably going to have the contacts to do this type of work. Do not rely on automated translation systems – these are rough only and will backfire in an overall search marketing campaign.
Directories? They are emerging as a good resource and they are gradually becoming better at accommodating advertising needs. Directories are very good if you have the time and resources to find the good ones. They can give you very good reach for not a lot of cost/effort.
Thanks to Chris Sherman and iProspect for a very informative and worthwhile session. I learned a lot about going multinational and I’m sure everyone else who attended appreciated the wealth of information! You can listen to entire recorded version by clicking here.
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When Neil H. Borden came up with the Marketing Mix and Professor E. Jerome McCarthy grouped the Mix into “the 4 Ps†they were probably not considering 21st century marketing and promotion channels on the Internet.
After all, this was in the middle of the 20th century and Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.com search engines and Internet Social Networks did not exist at that point. Still, this enduring and universal marketing concept applies to the web.
I’m always focused on how the 4 P’s of Marketing apply to Internet Marketing. So how do the 4 P’s apply to the Internet?
The first P in Marketing: Product
Product can be an actual product or service that you are delivering to you the market weather direct to consumer (B2C) or to businesses (B2B). On the web, it’s crucial to show your product on your website. If you are a retailer with an E-Commerce site, make sure you spend the money to show your products up close and in detail. Spend the money to get good photos of your products and make a great design on your site. It doesn’t need to be flashy (or Flash!), but make sure that a potential customer can come to your site and see the main products that you offer and see them in detail. Take the time, spend the money effort and resources to accurately describe your products and services.
If you are selling a service, this is something that a customer cannot touch or feel, so make sure you have some case studies on hand. Show your case studies, trials or demos on a website and please make sure you do all of the above in a search engine friendly manner. If you leave out the search engines in the equation, you losing a big opportunity on Placement and Promotion; P’s 3 and 4.
The second P in Marketing: Price
Don’t be afraid to show your prices online and in your Internet advertising. In most cases, displaying a price on an ad, whether a PPC, Contextual, Banner, or even in your organically listed search links in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), you’ll get better click through rates and likely more inquiries and conversions if you come right out and display your pricing.
In high-end service businesses this can be a bit tricky, but even there, to grab a potential customer’s attention, it can be valuable to display your price. Who cares if the competition sees your pricing. If you have a high quality product or service you can stand by…your going to win. Further, in a high end service business, by displaying your price, you can thwart contact from unwanted customers who don’t fit into your requisite budget ranges.
The third P in Marketing: Place and Placement
Placement on Major Search engines – Google, Yahoo, Live etc…Placement from a discovery perspective is controlled on the web really through search. When someone uses the web, it’s critical to make sure you show up in search for relevant terms. If you are not on the major search engines for terms related to your business, you are not taking care of placement and you’re likely to not be found or discovered in this important pull-marketing channel.
Placement on vertical search engines / guides and Local Search – finding the right vertical search engines like a business.com can make or break your placement. Trade and business directories and vertical search is one of the most important channels. Don’t miss this. Localized search submissions to places like www.local.google.com can make all the difference in being found and being successful as well.
Placement through affiliates - working with affiliates and developing a large and profitable network can be tremendously productive for many businesses.
Promotion through Display Advertising – Media buying for display, banners on CPM or CPC basis and email drops can be tremendously effective if properly placed and designed with the user and target audience in mind. Create outstanding design, powerful and unique copy-writing and make sure you have effective landing pages (tested with a group) to handle your display or “push” types of Internet advertising.
The fourth P in Marketing: Promotion
I don’t care if your business is retail B2C or B2B, you need to leverage nearly every promotion channel and strategy online.
Promotion on topical, industry and trade sites – seeking out the right industry sites is ever more important as the web user becomes more and more specific with their bookmarks and areas of the Internet that want to visit over and over. Get in front of the target audience in an effective way.
Promotion through Search Marketing - Put a big focus on search weather SEO, or SEM / PPC, it’s crucial to have strong search engine promotion and placement (full disclosure – we do SEO). On the organic side, Strategic Link building and high quality directory and article submissions can go a long way.
Promotion through Social Media – levering groups on the major social sites, promoting viral content and developing and strong following in social media is critical to long term success and properly placing your product or service in front of the right people.
Promotion through Public Relations – PR and reputation management is important. Don’t be shy to get out in the media and blogs and be mentioned for what you do and the quality of your products. Leverage the newest and best available channels. Make sure you are paying attention to the most influential corners of the Internet. As a side note, Steve Rubel did a fun post about the 4 P’s of Blogging which is worth a read.
Nowadays marketers are considering 7 P’s, but I figure if you tend to the “original” 4 P’s, it’s a good start.
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Using Epinions.com as an Internet Marketing Tool
Jan 9, 2008 by Jake Matthews | SEO, Social Networks
Epinions.com is great site for Internet and Brand Marketers to work in. The site is a user and member driven product/service review website. It is owned by Shopping.com which is in turn owned by…..Ebay.
How and why is the site useful for marketers? Aside from helping consumers looking for information about products, it can also help SEO’s, webmasters (who dabble in marketing) and brand managers by allowing them to monitor their products and develop traffic/awareness.
Epinions is all about writing reviews and interacting with knowledgeable people to get information about products. The basic uses from the consumer side are:
- Reading product reviews for information about the quality of a product or service.
- Finding information about products and services in advance of your purchase to help you with your decision on brand, price, and features; shopping comparison.
- Connecting with retailers who have good prices on these products.
The uses from an Internet Marketing and Brand Manager/Marketer perspective are:
- Connecting with users and showing them your web assets through linking from your profile page.
- Developing referral traffic to your websites.
- Leveraging the content creation capabilities to get your products in major searches.
- Monitoring your Brand and interacting through the sites communication features to help protect / defend it; reputation management.
User profiles are easy to set up and are not that advanced. You can have an avatar, emails, and bio information, but most importantly you can make links back to your own web assets. Important to know though is that the links I mention here on the profile page are not considered for link juice for search engines, but more for direct referral traffic to your site. 
They are not direct HTML links, but have referral code in between.
With an Epinions profile, you want to build up a “web of trustâ€. Like many social network sites, you are allowed to “trust†other users which is essentially friending them. The more you write reviews, the more likely others are to review your reviews and provide you the opportunity to join their web of trust / trust you back.
The assortment of user profiles are ranked by contribution status. The levels are:
Category Lead - Advisor
- Top Reviewer
- General Member
Reviews written: 226
Member Visits: 21,466
Total Visits: 1,027,278
Smartly, he has also completed out a very in depth bio page for his company and this allows you to have DIRECT, not no followed links back to sites! These pages are completely indexed in Google as evidenced with this search. It is likely too that this traffic is targeted as the user is a leads in specific verticals.
In all, Epinions is good for:
SEO – Some review’s rank in the search engines – probably not that high for competitive terms, but for obscure terms – the review titles can be found in the search engine result pages (SERP). Here is a recent search with a non competitive query, but when written properly, there are ways to leverage reviews for SEO / SERP purposes. Aaron Shear was behind a lot of the SEO at Epinions.com/Shopping.com and they did a bang-up job.
Referral Traffic – If you develop a strong web of trust by writing and trusting on Epinions.com, it is likely that your profile page will see more and more traffic. With that you can have referral links on your profile page which in turn send traffic to your own sites, or other sites that you want to be trafficked from this targeted group of visitors.
Brand / Reputation Management: Checking in on this site to see what consumers are saying about your products and services is important. When there is something negative , figure it out and solve the problem, and it may be useful to contact some users to make things right. When there are positive things said, let the user know you appreciate it.
Incidentally Ebay also owns StumbleUpon so I wonder when these worlds of StumbleUpon and Shopping.com /Epinons might ever collide? Could there be feature sharing etc and a merge of data / feeds as some point in the future? Already a fair amount of Epinions content shows up on Shopping.com.
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