Scott Porad

Often I am asked about search engine optimization (SEO), so I’ve asked Joel Gross, a search engine optimization expert based in Los Angeles, to write a guest post that goes beyond the basics of SEO.

As an search engine optimization expert working in the industry for four years now, I have come across quite a few tidbits that only professional SEO’s are privy to. The blog post you are about to read will share some of the strategies and tactics that I have found many web designers, businesspeople and even some marketing people don’t know about or overlook.

Clickthrough & Bounce Rates

Links and copy might be the two most important factors in where your website ranks in Google search results, but clickthrough & bounce rates are quickly becoming the third most important factor. If users don’t click on your page in the search results or if they go to your page then quickly bounce out, that is a clear signal to search engines that your page is not meeting the users query. Google makes 99.9% of it’s revenue from its advertising system that uses Quality Score * Max CPC to determine where to rank ads (the Sponsored Listings area of search results). Quality Score’s chief component is clickthrough rate. Clickthrough rate is very important for both advertising on Google and for ranking well in organic search. Monitor your clickthrough & bounce rates closely and do what it takes to help increase each one.

Calling for Links

Many people think they can reach out and get links from people with bulk emails or personalized emails requesting partnerships. I have discovered that the best use of time though for getting great links from authority websites and your competitors is by picking up the phone and calling them. Response rates on emails about links are very low since people have been spammed to death. I have followed this strategy on my LA math tutoring website and have had really great response rates. 40% of people I get ahold of on the phone agree to put a link to my site on theirs and about half of those actually follow through. Compare that to emailing for links 2-3% response rate with maybe one in ten of those people actually putting your link on their site. Calling and making a personal connection is far more successful than sending bulk email to get ignored. Strategies for a successful call:

• Talk about building a “partnership” instead of just asking for the link right away
• Tell them how linking to your site will benefit their customers/readers
• Offer a link in return from another website (to avoid reciprocal links)

Use Wordpress

Wordpress is not only free to use, easy to develop on and supported by a large community of developers, but it has had the input of tons of SEO experts and web designers and is the best optimized CMS package out of the box. It is also easily customizable and you can find tons of cheap developers to build on it. You are also able to safely allow people with no web experience to create & add new pages with impunity by giving them an author/contributor role. I used Wordpress + a few plugins to build my online marketing blog into a powerhouse with 80,000+ unique visitors each month. Even highly professional non-blog websites such as the Beverly Hills cosmetic surgery site and the guide to Los Angeles site use it.

To quickly set up Wordpress, go to this page and follow the instructions to install on your host. 1and1.com has good cheap web hosting, more advanced users with heavy traffic should look at mediatemple’s hosting packages. Once wordpress is installed, choose your theme (make sure it allows html text for your title and not just an image) and install these plugins in order of importance: Akismet (no comment spam), Google Analyticator (measuring & tracking performance), Feedburner Feedsmith (more tracking & some publicizing), Yet Another Related Posts plugin (auto generated links at the bottom of each post), aLinks (auto placed links in text on certain keywords), Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (important for crawling), Google XML sitemaps (crawling), All in one SEO pack (not really necessary anymore), Increase Sociability (call to action for certain types of visitors).

Pay for Copy

During the last year, I have had outsourced copywriters produce over 3,000 pages of keyword-optimized 500+ word articles for between $4-7 per page. Copy is one of the major cornerstones of SEO and you can never have too much of it (unless you use copy generators which search engines can spot). Having unique articles written for your websites by outsourced copywriters will far outstrip your abilities to write alone and gives you a major leg up on your competitors in search rankings. It enables you to specially target many long tail terms that otherwise you would be forced to overlook and provides readers of that content valuable information that pertains specifically to what they had searched for. All of the copy on my Carpet Cleaners Bellevue website was written for $40 total. Not the best copy, but a great price to help me quickly get up a site & test the market.

Outsourcing copy on the cheap can be done using Elance.com to find inexpensive copywriters. You will have to carefully screen their work to find good ones, but when you do it can be very profitable for both parties. Ask your writer to send you the first five articles they write for you so you can check and make sure it’s a good fit before having them run off 50 or a 100. Many books have been written on how to write good copy, but a favorite resource of mine is Copyblogger. If I was you, I would come up with a list of instructions for how you want your copy written & add to it with each new writer. Eventually you will have a very effective document to help them get started. To write keyword-optimized articles, you need to use the keyword in the title tag, meta description tag, page title tag, multiple times in the page copy and in anchored links pointing to the page. You can do research on long tail terms using the Google Adwords external keyword tool and selecting “exact” phrase matching.

If you are interested in other general SEO tips & tricks, please feel free to ask in the comments section!

Thanks for reading,

Joel Gross