SEO and Software Don’t Mix

I understand in today’s marketplace the need for automation grows and grows as companies seek to cut costs across the board. Streamlining a process down to a science and eliminating as much human interaction seems to be a growing trend but does it work for marketing a website and for SEO? Manufacturing yes, internet marketing to humans? No.

There is not a SEO software program on the planet that can successfully step into the shoes of your audience and try to anticipate what their online behavior or patterns might be at that given moment. There is something that will always require a human touch, search engine optimization and internet marketing equally requires the human marketing touch. When optimizing a website you need to stop and think about each page and really determine what kind of user you want to drive to that specific page. Which keyword you chose to target on that page will deliver a certain type of end user. This thought process is something a computer program is not going to be able to nail down correctly. What if you are torn between two keywords or phrases and both deliver a slightly different end user, do you think a software program would pick that up and pick the right keyword? Most likely not. Software can be used to do many research tasks like keyword research or design but software cannot write a custom crafted meta tag and description like a human could. The human element will always be a factor when communicating with other humans. It would be like asking a program to come up with an award winning design campaign for your brand. What if a software program puts in a keyword that is completely wrong for your business and you don’t catch it. Then you could be wasting the opportunity to build more targeted visitors.

Search engine optimization also requires a certain element of experience. An SEO software product can not by substituted for experience, but experience can play a role to help utilize an SEO software product. The experience of doing certain online efforts and analyzing the results only to tweak and refine to streamline even more. This is only acquired over time. This type of experience is invaluable and SEO software just doesn’t have the capabilities to analyze what works and what doesn’t. If your website generates only a small number of visitors but your conversion margins are very high does the software understand this? Who is to say something works over something that doesn’t? Every business will have their own tools and benchmarks for measuring their own success. If you are thinking about trying to use software to market your business think again, if you have a good amount of SEO and/or internet marketing experience as a business owner, marketer or web master, then there are software products out there that can help automate certain tasks to make you life easier, but it will not do the work for you! For instance, I use several excellent products to do my job, (Keyword Discovery, Compete, Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, etc.) I don’t only rely on these tools alone to make important mission critical SEO and internet marketing decisions for my clients. When you are evaluating SEO software products out there, just think of this: If it was that easy everybody would be doing it. Reaching out to humans and developing and executing a comprehensive strategy requires a human touch and always will.

How to Put Together a Link Building Strategy

Most of you understand that marketing a business or website is important and with that comes the need for some sort of plan to get the job done. Don’t just try to store the plan in your head. Write it down and visualize it so you can better understand what it is that you are up against. Pull up a fresh excel worksheet and let’s get started.

Start by creating a 12 month outline for your link building plan. This way you can visualize what is coming up ahead and make changes whenever necessary. You will most likely make some sort of changes at some point throughout the year. Ask yourself what type of press release marketing you want to do for the year. List all the distribution sources and which one you prefer to take. Check off which months you want to launch that effort in and also if possible topics you might want to announce if you don’t have any real newsworthy items happening at that specific time. Below that do the same for any article marketing you are planning to do. Remember that when you scroll down each month you want to have a variety of items you are doing that particular month so don’t just focus on one effort and beat it into the ground. You want to make sure your approach is highly diverse with a strong emphasis on really branding your business online. It is important that each month you find some sort of niche industry site you can become a part of. The niche sites will be important for your link building and also for generating highly targeted website traffic over to your website.Soldier of Love

After you have finalized these three areas in your link building strategy you will want to concentrate on a handful of profiles you can list your business in that could potentially bring in a new possible client or even just a visitor to your website who might be curious. You can see that we are diversifying the approach which is exactly what you want to do at all times when marketing your business on the internet. If you find an area online that brings over more than usual traffic and exposure it is important to hang out there but don’t neglect other possible locations that could bring in just as many new clients or customers. Write out your strategy like this and it will create a much clearer picture for you to visualize what it is going to be going on with your website.The Help

Do Not Worry About PageRank

For years people have always made an effort to really focus on increasing their Google pagerank as much as possible. I always ask people, what is it about Google pagerank that makes you want to increase it so badly? Many times they really didn’t know how to answer the question or at least answer it correctly.

For many years Google pagerank was the sought out factor for many people diving into search engine optimization. Over the years it has been severely abused as people seek out science project like marketing campaigns only to increase page rank. News flash, rankings alone don’t grow a business and the search engines are really starting to evolve and change the way that they rank websites. They are tweaking and modifying search engines to only reward those who take a natural approach to building their business. An approach that builds over time with heavy branding and marketing elements rather than pouncing on loop holes to achieve rankings in search engines. Internet marketing company HubSpot based out of Boston MA had this to say about Google page rank: “Page Rank has nothing to do with SEO rankings or results. I know of websites that have a Page Rank of 0, and yet they still get organic rankings and search traffic for competitive search terms.”

Basically what HubSpot is saying is that businesses and websites should be focusing on building their brand and their business and not worrying about what the Google pagerank of their website is. At the end of the day page rank does not offer any value. You can’t track where your page rank comes from or why it is even there. It has almost become a distraction for website owners that have lost focus on what it really means to market your business online. Even Google has removed any mention of pagerank from their guidelines.

A recent Q&A session on one of Google’s forums had this to say:
“Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.”

When Google comes out and says it than you better believe that it is true in every possible way. You can read more about Google’s view point on page rank on the Google webmaster forum. I given touched on the subject of Google PageRank sculpting as a waste of time a few months ago as well.