The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

A few posts ago, I wrote about shaping your keyword selection for your website around your customers perceptions. In The best keyword is not always the most desired term, we discussed that even though the term “mobile home” has not been the official term for a manufactured home, it was still ingrained (by better than 2:1) in customers consciousness and needed to be addressed when optimizing web pages in order to not miss out on those customers.

This time we’re going to enlarge on that a bit and explore just what keywords you’ll want to optimize for.

We’re going to go back to the Google Keyword tool and check a few more keywords related to our industry.

In the comments of my last post, John Thalacker posted the stat that the term “Clayton Homes” pulled 165,000 searches, far and away the most searched brand.

Here are a few more manufacturers (definitely not an inclusive list) and the keyword search stats for them this past month.

If you’re in the process of optimizing, and you are a dealer for a manufacturer, be sure to optimize for the best keywords and for the manufacturer you represent. Make it easy for customers to find you.

Let’s try one more set of keywords – what they call “long-tail” keywords. Long-tail keywords are multi-word phrases that further qualify and narrow the search. They often contain a location. They are commonly used by people looking for a local business that has what they want. They tend to be more qualified than short-keyword searchers because they are looking for a specific product in a specific location.

Optimize for “long-tail keywords” that are pertinent to you and you’ll will get less – but much more highly qualified – leads.

Lets have a look at a few:

Using a blog in your marketing efforts has an added advantage of using “tags.” Tags are very much like the old “keywords” Meta tag that has been deprecated by the search because of abuse.

You can optimize a blog post for a set of keywords much the same as any other web page. But then, using more variations of your keywords as “tags” will cause your blog post to show in results for those keywords.

Last week, I launched a website for a local limousine service here in Danville, KY. We used keyword specific pages and optimized for long-tail (localized keywords).

Within 4 days, we had grabbed the #4 spot in Google results for the keyword “Limousine, Danville KY” an ideal placement for the company. The #3 search result is my blog post announcing the launch of the website, so he is in effect holding the #3 and #4 positions.

Here is the Google SERP for that keyword set:

We’ve had some astounding results in ranking well for multiple keywords using WordPress software installed on the clients webs server. Much better result than we’ve had with WordPress.com or Blogger.

I believe that is because of the plugins that are available to self-hosted blogs. We’ll get into that more in the future.

How do you optimize for more keywords?

The best way I know of is to create more pages for your website, using each of them to optimize for a specific keyword set. As an example, visit my landing page for Danville, KY Online Marketing. You’ll notice in the navigation for this site that there are links to landing pages for each keyword for each city in my area. This page – in addition to serving as a landing page – ranks #1 on Google for its keyword set.

This is even easier to do and more effective using a similar technique in a WordPress self-hosted blog.

Start thinking about how you can better your Search Engine Ranking for specific keywords or get with us for a consultation.

Many of us spend a good deal of time online – marketing, listing properties or products, blogging, social networking or just surfing the web. It’s that last one that can cause some problems.

When you conduct a search for something on the web, how can you be sure that the site you are about to visit is free of malware, viruses and worms or actually has the content you are looking for – not just another Viagra ad or surprise porn?

And how do you influence what your kids see when they click try to visit a site or a link on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP)?

Web of Trust (WOT) is a community-powered web rating service that I wrote about in Safer Surfing – That’s WOT it’s about at BobStovall.com this morning.

They give you a free add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. Once you’ve installed the add-on, every website you visit and every Google search result will display the WOT “donut.”

(If you use Safari or Opera, there is a bookmarklet that you place in your bookmarks toolbar. Clicking it brings up a window in which you can rate websites.)

If enough WOT members have visited the site and rated it (on trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety) the WOT donut will show green for highly rated sites, yellow for sites with some reservations and red for sites you should avoid.

One great feature – if the child safety rating is low, you can use WOT to block viewing the site.

You can even see a site’s rating before you go there as WOT ratings will show up on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here’s an example of a search term that tends to draw red flags.

If you or your company have a website or blog, you want to ensure that you have a green rating for all four rating criteria. One idea for doing that, is to get your WOT add-on, rate our website – then, add your website’s URL in the comments below and ask other readers of this post to rate you.

Because there is no influence over others rating your URL, we don’t have to worry about bad sites wasting our time asking us to rate them.

You can get your WOT add-on at the Web of Trust Downloads page. While you’re there, take a few moments to find out how the system works and how you can put it to work for you.

I posted this partially tongue-in-cheek Top Ten list to my blog at BobStovall.com on Tuesday. I’ve gotten so much positive feedback that I decided I should share it with you as well.

It’s amazing to me the number of small businesses serving local markets that still don’t have a website. Or, they have one but it hasn’t been updated in months or years.

But not ALL businesses need an updated and dynamic website. So I’ve carefully compiled a list – in Top Ten fashion – of businesses that don’t need a website. I hope you aren’t one of these:

10. Businesses that are closed.

9. Businesses that are about to close.

8. Businesses that will hold their head just above water for a time and then close.

7. Businesses that don’t need customers.

6. Businesses that don’t need money.

5. Businesses that are afraid of success.

4. Businesses that don’t want to plan a future.

3. Business owners that will win the lottery.

2. Businesses backed by a Sugar Daddy.

1. The Mob

No matter how bad your current (or non-existent) website is, it’s never too late. Resolve to fix it now so you can begin reaping the rewards of a fresh, updated website now.