Keyword Research (Part 3) Sorting key phrases

February 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
- Susan Sontag

Keyword relevancy–or weighted popularity–as some call it, is the practice of deciding “yes” or “no” regarding the question of “if” a key phrase is truly a real world search by someone who’s looking for you or your services. This is the first step in the key phrase sorting process. Essentially we need to determine if our key phrase is truly relevant based on nothing more than our ability to examine and deconstruct the term. We do this by going through our list and examining each of the key phrases; during this process we need to ask ourselves one simple question “Was the person who typed these words looking for me?” Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Keyword Research (Part 3) Key phrases

February 13, 2008 | 1 Comment

“One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a customer would use to find your site. You don’t. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it’s difficult to predict how a paying customer would go about looking for it.” - Lisa Barone - SearchEngineGuide.com

Now that we understand why we do keyword research and which basic seo tools to use, we moved on to define the core mission of our website and then to discover our “core” keywords. This is a strong foundation that allows us to confidently move to the next steps in the process.
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Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Keyword Research (Part 2) Your core keywords

February 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Once you’ve come to the conclusion that all keywords are not created equal you’ll be ready to move into a deeper understanding of keyword research. To learn which keywords you should target and which one’s should be left by the wayside, you should take some time and start by trying to determine your “core” keywords. To discover your core keywords you need to determine the core purpose of your website.
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Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Keyword research (Part 1) Advice on getting started

January 31, 2008 | 1 Comment

If you’re a beginner you may be wondering where you start with all this business of SEO. Do you start by writing quality content around your target business, product or niche? Do you start by designing your website and manipulating your code in some magical way? Do you start by building a site and then going about the work of getting people to link to your site?

Let me just say that all of the tasks mentioned above are important, but they’re not the most important first step in an SEO campaign. Your first step should always be research. You may know it as keyword research, keyword discovery, key phrase selection or any number of different titles. What’s important is that you know that it’s the first - and most important step - before you do anything else. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Keywords in your domain name

January 26, 2008 | 5 Comments

Quickstart summary: Should you purchase multiple domain names that contain your most important keywords? I get this question all the time. Well, the answer is “yes” and “no”. Really, I don’t think it benefits you to own multiple domain names that point to the same website unless you’re just trying to secure domain names that the competition might utilize. In general, the search engines are focused on your content and other elements related to your page so you should focus your SEO efforts here. The words in your domain name can figure into your ranking but they should not be your primary focus. Here are a couple things to consider. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Hosting and SEO

January 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Where you host your website is usually not high on the list of considerations when first addressing the issue of SEO and online marketing. Most people look first for a reliable host that meets their needs and they consider the business of marketing at a later date. This is a mistake. They’re immediate needs might include space, bandwidth, price or special features like free domain name for life. Whahoo!

All of these things are important. (Well, except for the free domain name) I’d rather pay the $10 a year and retain control of my name. Anyway, my point is that most people don’t know what’s important regarding SEO and your hosting. Without further delay, here’s a quick rundown of the important points regarding SEO and your website hosting. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

SEO for designers: Goals and consistency

January 21, 2008 | 1 Comment

Continuing our discussion of search engine friendly design considerations I offer you part 6 of a 6 part series on SEO friendly design:

Design your page with your goals in mind.

Part of SEO is allowing for easy feed subscription, encouraging links to your content, easy newsletter sign-up, clear membership information, ease of product navigation and easy access to contact information. Many people might wonder what this has to do with search engine optimization and I’m here to tell you that it’s all very important.

Your job when designing your website is to encourage links back to the content. You do this by providing ways for people to bookmark the site, subscribe via RSS and signup for a newsletter. This will keep your site “top-of-mind” with people that are interested in your content and ideally they’ll be remided to read and continue to link.

One of the most popular and simple ways to encourage linking is to include an RSS feed and to provide a clear way to subscribe to your feed. If you use Wordpress like I do, the feed is generated automatically. Services like Feedburner and Technorati can help you easily distribute your feed and allow easy subscription too.

There are many other ways to encourage linking and to stay top-of-mind and I won’t go into them here. But my point should ring true. When designing your page, make sure you provide ways to encourage linking and repeated visits to your content. Our goal is to encourage linking from high quality sites.

Be consistent and present a sense of legitimacy.

Your design should have a cohesive feel, an appealing and appropriate “vibe” and a high quality, well thought out presentation throughout. This will also provide a strong sense of legitimacy that people need to return, subscribe and link. Obviously with a cohesive, well thoughtout, consistent system, the search engines will be able to easily spider every page of your site too - which is our ultimate goal.

As designers, our goal is to present our content is a way that’s easy and enjoyable to read. But an underlying goal is to present the content in a format that looks like someone actual cares about how the content is presented. A cohesive, well thoughtout navigation scheme, a consistent identity and appropriate color scheme go a long way to encourage repeat visits. After all, as much as people think that content is king, there is a large majority of readers out there that need an enjoyable experience while they’re reading. I personally subscribed to a online networking site the other day over several others because the image of the site was more hip and enjoyable. I knew if I was going to spend any amount of time on the site that I would have to enjoy my time there. I did subscribe to another networking site and I haven’t been back since because it just didn’t present a feeling of quality and fun.

That experience includes color choice, font size, font type, intuitive navigation, simple subscription tools and many others. In a nutshell, a sense of legitimacy and care for your presentation with the goal of appealing to your target audience. It’s the same reason that people choose one book over another based on the cover and why certain people prefer large, hard cover books over smaller, cheaper paperbacks. It’s the same reason why I enjoy reading the PRINT version of “The Week” over a traditional newspaper. (Yes, I do subscribe to some traditional media) It has a very consistent layout and presentation, the type is clearly spaced and readable and it’s presented in a way that allows me to easily scan and get the information that I need each week.

The same is not true for other publications (which I will not mention here) which present their information as large chunks of content that appear differently each week/month. A newspaper is an example of a publication format that I hate. If the same information was presented in a consistent, high quality way I might enjoy going back to it. Reading a newspaper has always been work for me. It’s a clunky format, it feels cheap and low quality, the sections are always laid out differently, articles are broken up within different sections, the photos are low quality and the text is usually smaller and harder to read. I would read the same content and enjoy it much more on a website or in a nice glossy magazine because I enjoy the experience more.

Consider this when you’re building your website and content. An enjoyable experience will encourage repeat visits, links, word-of-mouth exposure, and prestigious awards if it’s done very well. All of this will surely help your SEO campaign and overall rankings in time.


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

What is SEO?

January 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment

For those of you inquisitive individuals doing a search on this elusive, confusing term I thought I would offer up my interpretation of what exactly SEO means.

Maybe you’ve heard the term during an office water cooler conversation or maybe you’ve seen a reference to it online. Maybe you even know enough that it has to do with marketing your website in the search engines. For most people, SEO means performing some crazy, juju-voodoo magic on your website with the ambitious goal of ranking your website in the top positions.

Let me just say that it doesn’t have to be that complicated and there is very little voodoo on hand here. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Starting and marketing a new business online

December 17, 2007 | 1 Comment

By Chris Auman

For those intrepid, brave souls who just started a business or recently moved to the web you might be wondering where you should start? How do you get customers to your website and make money? The internet is a vast imbroglio; a complicated maze of digital wonderment. How can someone find little ol’ me in the endless maze of the web? In essence you are the smallest needle in the world’s largest haystack. Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of starting and promoting a business on the internet. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

20 New (and old) ideas for driving targeted traffic to your LOCAL site

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Driving real traffic to your site these days is a never ending battle that most people think is beyond their reach if they don’t spend thousands of dollars on search engine optimization or further fill the pot of gold that Google is building with their pay-per-click Adsense program. Obviously these techniques should be a cornerstone of your online marketing program. But there are many more affordable techniques that can help you drive traffic and all it takes is a little elbow grease and maybe a few extra bucks. I’m not talking about just any traffic though. What we want is local, targeted website traffic that drives real clients and customers to your local website and your local business. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

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