Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Economic Development Organizations
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A webinar that brings the basics of search engine optimization to local economic development organizations and explains how they can take relevant steps to improve their online visibility.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Economic Development Organizations
- 1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Economic Development Organizations // Derek Pillie and Kevin Mullett LEDOsuite.comtwitter.com/LEDOsuitefacebook.com/LEDOsuiteyoutube.com/user/cirrusabslinkedin.com/companies/cirrus-abs
- 2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Economic Development Organizations // Derek Pillie and Kevin Mullett LEDOsuite.comtwitter.com/dpilliefacebook.com/dpillielinkedin.com/in/dpilliejust search for “derekpillie” or “dpillie” Project Manager – LEDO Suite
- 4. You know attracting new investors means going where they are
- 5. You know that you know these investors are online
- 6. Over 90% of site selection begins (or ends) on the web
- 7. Do you have the right info to be shortlisted (or not get cut)?
- 9. How the “alphabet soup” of terms like SEO, SERP, H1, META, ALT, etc. impact how potential investors find your website
- 10. How YOU can use free online tools to improve your online SEO visibility
- 11. What efforts you can focus on to maximize the impact of your SEO efforts
- 13. Hybrid company that offers the best of marketing and technology firms
- 14. 25+ employees
- 15. Full staff of technical & creative personnel
- 19. Economic Development, Education, Insurance…
- 20. Corporate Solutions for Distributor/Dealer Networks
- 22. Cirrus ABS Featured Corporate Clients
- 23. SEO // Optimization, marketing, or visibility search engine optimization is*: developing a website utilizing best practices and in such a manner that there are no encumbrances to the search engines ability to crawl a site and properly understand the subject of the site, find the sites pages, links, and documents, so that it might be included in the search engines organic or natural index appropriately. * but it depends on who you ask and search engine marketing is an open debate.
- 24. SEO // Technical, onsite & offsite factors There are technical, onsite, & offsite factors that contribute to your sites’ search engine result page (SERP) performance.
- 25. SEO // Winning requires knowledge What are the rules? How can I optimize within the rules? Which races can I win while staying within my budget? Am I dedicated to the winning strategy? How much is winning worth?
- 26. SEO // Architecture matters I’ve never seen a perfect launch, i.e. one where I got todo everything I wanted Projects are always limited by: time, money, effort, resources, knowledge, buy in (from staff and board members) Test conversions, measure results
- 27. SEO // Is it the intent winner? Social Direct mail Television Radio Tradeshows Newspaper Yellow pages Search marketing SEO
- 28. SEO // Visibility is online currency No visibility = no clicks Unattractive or spammy titles & descriptions (snippets) = no clicks Clicks for incorrect terms = no conversion Poorly planned landing pages with no CTA = no conversion
- 30. Can you change META info?
- 31. Is your site trapped in Flash?
- 32. Do your site visitors have a reason to come back or refer you?
- 33. Can you even add or modify SEO content without a programmer?
- 34. Do you have enough pages to “tell the story”?
- 37. Google Caffeine data center change
- 38. Bing + Yahoo = “Bing-hoo”
- 40. SEO // All things being equal… There are over 200 criteria so you must do competitive analysis to maximize the return on your efforts.
- 41. SEO // All things being equal… There are over 200 criteria so you must do competitive analysis to maximize the return on your efforts.
- 42. SEO // Action 1 Create a list of competitors sites Run competitive analysis with majestic SEO: http://majesticseo.com/bulk-backlink-checker.php Develop a plan to win or call in reinforcements
- 43. SEO // Action 2 Setup Google profiles for you & your organizationhttp://www.google.com/profiles
- 44. SEO // Select the right keywords We've taken clients to number one on Google based on keywords they insisted had to be there, only to find out that a slight derivation would have yielded exponential traffic.
- 45. SEO // Action 3 Poll your existing employers; ask who are your potential investors Write down what you really do & who you are competing against Take the keywords & keyword phrases you think are important and verify volume with http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- 46. SEO // I have nothing to write! A common complaint is not knowing what to write & what keywords to target Fresh content is crucial Newest articles winall else being equal Increases site depth Increases crawl rate
- 47. SEO // Technical considerations When writing page titles Keep the title to 70 characters when possible Use localization and keywords/keyphrases early in the title Think about attractiveness + bolded words (will it get clicked?) When writing meta descriptions(these usually become snippet) Keep the description to 156 characters when possible Think about attractiveness + bolded words Consider the impact on your CTR and visibility Words included in your titles and descriptions should also appear on the page
- 48. SEO // Technical considerations Header tags: H1-H6 ALT tags: often missed (don't say picture or image of, Google already knows its an image)
- 49. SEO // Action 4 For each page of your site run & reviewhttp://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/(Don't try so hard to get a certain saturation that you lose good long tail connecting words or relevance! Don’t stress about duplicate content.) Change title tags & descriptions first because they are valuable & clarify thinking Start with keywords & keyword phrases you already rank for Make sure there is a call to action on every page
- 50. SEO // Internal linking; don’t click here Formulating your internal linking structure Search engines want to know what’s on the other end Keyword use where it is highly valuable Example: Click here for our Search Engine Optimization Services.
- 51. SEO // All backlinks aren’t equal Why do we want backlinks? Visibility / brand recognition Traffic generation / linkbait(to pages or our site) To encourage page or site indexing Increase page rank / authority to impact SERPs Because someone told you to get them
- 52. SEO // Action 5 Ask community partners for backlinks Ask current investors (mutually beneficial btw) Create new, subject matter expert, articles on your site and tell the world Link to the page with content, not always home Look for places to post your site or site RSS feed
- 53. SEO // Did it work? Do it again! Check Google Analytics or server logs for:bounce rates, time on site, pages visited, conversion pages, confirmation pages (setup advanced filters & funnels) Monitor contacts, calls, lead sources Google A/B testing
- 54. SEO // Action 6 Get: Rank Checker A Firefox browser add-on Measure baseline Measure changes Measure competition Check in “private browsing”
- 55. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Economic Development Organizations // Derek Pillie and Kevin Mullett kevinmullett.comtwitter.com/kmullettfacebook.com/kevinmullettlinkedin.com/in/kevinmullettjust google“kevinmullett” Director of Product Development
- 56. SEO // Upcoming webinars Join us for future webinars every other Thursday Watch LEDOsuite.com for updates Thursday, December 9th, Using Analytics to Demonstrate ROI to ED Stakeholders Thursday, December 23rd, Social Media for Economic Developers
- 57. We'll Help You Master Internet Marketing These days it’s more important than ever for you to reach new investors, satisfy existing businesses, find new efficiencies, and improve your local business climate. The Web is the way to do it. We can help! Call Derek Pillie at 1.877.817.4442 to find out how we can improve your online visibility.
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Webinar:SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Presented by Derek Pillie & Kevin Mullett for LEDO Suite by Cirrus ABS on December 2,2010 for an online webinar. You can find us at: http://www.LEDOsuite.com (project page & news updates), http://twitter.com/LEDOsuite (twitter), http://www.facebook.com/LEDOsuite (facebook), http://youtube.com/user/CirrusABS, and on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/companies/cirrus-abs
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Presented by Derek Pillie, for Cirrus ABS. You can find Derek: http://www.LEDOsuite.com (project page & news updates), http://twitter.com/dpillie (twitter), http://www.facebook.com/dpillie (facebook), and on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/dpillieI have worked in the economic development field in northeastern Indiana for a number of years and have been through Indiana’s Economic Development Course. I just started with Cirrus ABS a few weeks ago as the Project Manager for the LEDO Suite because I have a passion for making economic development organizations more effective at attracting outside investment.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Why are you here?Let’s talk about why you were motivated to click on that link to sign up for this webinar! One thing I have noticed is that there is a strong interest in search engine optimization but little understanding of it. Economic developers seem to know that it is important for their websites but they’re not sure WHY it’s important.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: What will you learn?Okay I’m going to note the time here so that if there’s a huge drop-off at this point I’ll know why you left! Seriously though, I don’t think there’s much point in spending your valuable time in a webinar if we’re not going to talk about what you’re interested in learning about. We do plan to do these webinars every other week and will deal with other specific topics like social media and analytics in future sessions.If you don’t feel like we’ve addressed these points by the time we’re done, I welcome you to call me out on it! At this point I’ll give a great deal of credit to Kevin Mullett who we’ll be hearing from later and Bill Gardiner our Director of Sales for their help with this presentation. While I’ve done some customizations to make it relevant specifically to economic development organizations, they have done much of the original work and research for this presentation.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: About Cirrus ABSWe’re not going to dwell a great deal on this, but I want you to know we’re not a fly-by-night operation and we do know what we’re talking about when it comes to online technology and marketing. Cirrus ABS has been finding ways to help make organizations more effective since the Internet became relevant to many of us.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: About Cirrus ABSWe build projects for large companies and small businesses… we do design work and we build the backbone that runs the website.A recent development has been an improvement of our content management system that has allowed the company to develop industry-specific solutions like the LEDO Suite for economic development organizations among other specialties.
- Today we will discuss Search Visibility, which includes both Search Engine Optimization and Marketing. What does that mean? Not everyone agrees, but here has been Kevin Mullett’s “go to” definition. The process of developing a website utilizing best practices and in such a manor that there are no encumbrances to the search engines’ ability to crawl a site and properly understand the subject of the site, find the sites pages, links, and documents, so that it might be included in the search engines organic or natural index appropriately.Search engine marketing is an open debate, but I have generally went with the definition that describes it as increasing the search engines awareness of your site and it’s pages to improve their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). There is little argument that search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and paid search are all part of search engine visibility.
- We will also discuss onsite (on page), offsite, and to a lesser degree technical (best practice) factors. And don't worry if you have no idea what that means, you will when you leave. I could bore you to death, and possibly will anyway, with search history, articles from the past, and crystal ball like predictions, but I won't. Some articles by top SEOs from last year have been rendered useless due to algorithmic changes. Some of the items I say today will have a limited shelf life. So goes search. There are some advanced concepts we use that are very time consuming and technical in nature. I could not begin to explain them all in this one hour presentation, so I will do my best not to digress into long explanations of such. So let's get to it.
- To win against your competitors in the search optimization game requires some knowledge, unless your competition isn’t trying. It’s easy to win if there is no competition. To win requires an understanding of the rules so you don’t get disqualified. You can be the best driver, but if you are stuck in the back of the pack you will not have a chance to show it. Optimization is part of the race regardless if you have the knowledge or not. Of course you need to decide early on how much winning is worth and what your budget is to go after it. And like most things if you don’t have a strategy, well, we all know how that goes.At this very race a competitor was disqualified for getting a bit too creative with the rules. This is analogous to black hat search optimization techniques.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: The Difficult Truth, it's not about money it is about time, unless you don't have time, then you need to spend money. If you don't have the time, or someone on staff who does, you will need someone you can call to explain it. Someone who will weed out fad from fact. Even if you engage us to help, we need you to show interest and participate in your marketing success. Another difficult realization is that launching a site is not an item to check off some list. Unless the check says, now it's time to get serious. I've never seen a PERFECT site launch. What's a perfect site launch? One where I was able to do everything I wanted to do. Heck, I didn't even get to do EVERYTHING for our site launch. Projects are always limited by one or more of the following; time, money (which can affect time), effort, resources, knowledge, and buy in (from HiPPOs or you; the client). Any company you deal with will have those same limiting factors.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Right now, you need to be going where the traffic is or more pointently, where you can be visible. And while being visible is great, if efforts are put into areas where there is no intent for action, ROI will be low. Just who or what do we want to be visible too? The obvious answer is people who would like to use our product or service. The not so obvious answer is where search bots frequent.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Even if you show up well in the SERPs you must pay attention to click ability for overall conversion, an often overlooked part of the success equation. It doesn't matter how much traffic you can drive if it's the wrong traffic (wrong keywords) or if they never take action. Lack of conversion can be caused by things like, poor site usability, design not fitting subject or demographic, lack of calls to action (CTA), etc.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Do you have a “lame duck” website?For those of you who participated in our ED 101 webinar a few weeks ago this slide will sound familiar – it’s a pretty standard term around here at Cirrus mainly because we see these problems ALL TOO OFTEN! These factors are all SEO or content specific as to what could make your website a lame duck. I’ve had customers request optimization help for their site and I’ve said we’d be glad to take your money but we won’t be able to do a whole lot with the architecture of your site.There are too many ways your competitors for new investment are reaching out to developers, you can’t afford to be out of this race. You may not see the impact today, but as you slip further behind it will have an impact.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: This has been a huge year for search engine changes! Google has dozens of blogs, so it is hard to know which product is going to affect your business today. For example how does personalized search affect you? (you will think you are ranking better then you are!) The scary thought is that this is, so far only considering Google.Remember Will Robinson from Meet the Robinsons : Keep moving forward!WHO IS WATCHING THIS at your organization?
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Recent developmentsThe Google Mayday update, which actually took place between April 28th through May 3rd, was an algorithmic change. Matt Cutts mentions in the video above that a increased emphasis on quality signals were added which hurt some sites that were using long-tail techniques on sites that were not relevant to the long-tail terms. This was not a webspam team change and no human intervention took place.While Matt Cutts of Google recently downplayed previous comments about site performance as a potential criteria for ranking, there is no doubt that Google has made recent changes encouraging site performance. Google Caffeine is one of those changes. In short it makes Google’s old index look antiquated in size and speed. A heavy emphasis has been put on continuously updating their global search index.Yahoo switched to Bing SERP results (completed in late August). According to Nielsen that puts the two together at 26% of all searches!Did you know that search engine Bing and social media powerhouse Facebook partnered together to integrate social “likes” into your Bing SERPs? Does your site have a Facebook Like button on articles? Do you have a Facebook page? All else being equal, who do you think people will click on if they see a friends “recommendation”?
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Let's start by making sure we are all on the same page as to what are some of the key terms and areas of a SERP (search engine result page) are. We also want to keep in mind that each page of your site can be ranked and indexed, not just the home page of your website.Google Tags is a newer service Google offers to separate you from your competitors. At $25 per month.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Take any of the 200 plus criteria and start by first comparing that to your competition. Let's say for example that your competition has a page (browser) title like this example (company name + service + location + stop words + other service + stop words) ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL you could likely win with (service + location | company name). Why include the company name? Branding and credibility which MAY lead to higher click through rate (CTR) from the SERP (search engine results page). Now if your competition has kept it to (service + location) and everything else was equal then you would want to match that method.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: When you scratch below the surface you can see the difference in how a few SEO items can make a huge difference in how your site presents online… both of these sites looked fairly similar from a design standpoint, but when you peek “under the hood” so to speak, you can see that these sites are NOT on a level playing field when it comes to online visibility.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations // Action 1: This seminar is all about having you leave today with actionable items. Care has been given to provide easy to implement SEO techniques that can have measurable impact on your websites performance. Knowing what your competition is doing allows you to extend efforts to the areas of highest return. And if all this seems too daunting, then it is time to call in reinforcements. 1.877.817.4442 // info@cirrusabs.com // http://www.cirrusabs.comLet’s use Majestic SEO, although there are many others, to check to see how many backlinks we have. Hey while we are at it, let’s pull out that competitor list from earlier and see how they fare. Keep in mind it is not simply quantity of backlinks but also quality of backlinks that is considered. Yahoo Site Explorer:https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.comSEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/Remember Edna Mode from The Incredibles – You will fight and WIN!
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations // Action 2: Set up your Google Profile, tie in your various websites, social services, and create anchor text links in the about me section. You will also want to go through the process of verifying your name, which needs to be done through Google Knol. After you have your profile filled out and your name verified we optionally want to associate your Google profile with Google Buzz. Be aware though that as of right now, if you choose to cancel buzz it will close your Google Profile. Directly tying Twitter to Buzz is frowned upon because of the way Google pulls in tweets.While Google Buzz is still extremely new, it started life with a huge boost since it tied directly into to Gmail. Something that not everyone was crazy about. Either way it is already approaching the size of twitter in far less time. As with all the social services it really boils down to where you ideal client is spending time and what other perks come along for the ride.Simply “liking” a Google Buzz post can show your name or company name in the SERPs.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: We've taken clients to number one on Google based on keywords they insisted had to be there, only to find out that a slight derivation would have yielded exponential traffic. It can be the difference between the terms you use in the industry and what clients actually ask for, or much worse developing an entire website for the wrong profit center or term. What we need is the right keywords, for the right demographics, that fit the budget and effort that will be used.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations // Action 3: The quandary many are left with is how to find the right SEO terms to optimize your site for. Let’s start with understanding who your clients are. After that let’s clarify what products or services return the most value to you, and how they fit with your online marketing efforts. Be specific about what you really do, who you really are as an organization, and who you compete with. Now put in keywords and keyword phrases from those exercises, and ones we will do later, into Google’s Keyword selector tool. Knowing the volume of the keywords and keyword phrases you wish to rank for affords you the opportunity to place emphasis on those that will yield the highest return, and you are most likely to be able to place for.
- Onsite SEO // If I have heard it once, I have heard it a hundred times; I’ve nothing to write about. We are back to the truism, if you don’t have the time or the expertise you will need to engage someone who does. This simply is too important to your online marketing efforts to avoid. There is no magic pill to make it all better. You need to have fresh content, significant site depth, and individual pages with keywords and keyword phrases, to draw both human and search engine bot traffic. There are many tools available to us to find good content. Start by familiarizing yourself with Google suggestions that drop down related words as you type into the search box (although if you have Google Instant turned on use that instead), and the Wonder wheel which is under the “show options” link at the top left of a Google SERP. We also encourage you to use RSS feeds and Google Alerts as additional ways to find good similar material you can write about. It should go without saying, don’t copy other peoples articles. Instead, pull a snippet and summarize what that article means to your clients or business and include a link to the original article. Frequency of updates directly affects crawl rate and freshness of content is one factor for determining your rank on a SERP. Look, you and those in your employ are subject matter experts, it’s time to tell the world about it.Remember Jack Black’s intro to Kung Fu Panda – great keyword density without sounding too awkwardLegend tells of a legendary warrior whose Kung Fu skills were the stuff of legend. He traveled the land in search of worthy foes. “I see you like to chew… maybe you should chew, ON MY FIST!” The warrior said nothing, for his mouth was full. Then he swallowed. And then he spoke, “Enough talk, let’s fight!” He was so deadly in fact, that his enemies would be blind from overexposure to pure awesomeness! “My eyes!” “He’s too awesome” “…and attractive!” “How can we repay you?” “There is no charge for awesomeness… or attractiveness” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr9upB3D67s
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Due to the limited time we have today, I will leave you with some simple technical techniques and generalities. When creating titles and meta descriptions, think of how you want it to appear on the SERP as well as what keywords need to be included. Pay particular attention to what words you want to be bolded in the SERP for each page, white paper, pdf, or article on your site. And of course do not sacrifice readability, CTA, and general conversion methods just to get traffic. The traffic is almost completely for naught if you can’t get them to convert. Almost.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Make sure that your website designer/developer has used appropriate header tags. You don’t need to use h1-h6, but you should at least have an h1 tag on the page and it should have the subject or keywords used in it. A commonly missed SEO item is picture or image alt text. Make sure to insert a descriptive alternate text representation of the pictures. Keep it short with a few keywords if applicable. Avoid mentioning that it is a picture or image as the search engines are already aware of that.
- SEO // Action 4: Repeat after me; I will not fret over meta keywords…I will not. Sure go ahead and include meta keywords, but do not treat them as a focus. Instead, review pages on your site where the search engines may not be clear on the subject or purpose. Change title tags and your meta descriptions as you create and alter content first. They are of high value and have a way of clarifying your thinking with regard to the subject of the page. See also SEOmoz: Latent Dirichlet AllocationShows relevance of a document to a query based on topics. (requires registration)tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/Keep in mind that what ever KW/KWP’s appear in your title tag must be in the content of the page. Do not “stuff” either. It is always helpful to start with keywords and keyword phrases that you already have placement on the search engines for, rather then starting for terms that you have never ranked for. Do make sure though that the words are the correct words. The ones we validated earlier.
- Onsite SEO // We want to at least think about how we will create our internal website linking structure. The term “click here” returns 4 billion results. Do you really want to fight for relevance with that many other links? In our example we use keyword anchor text to send people to the page on our site that has the most relevant information. The search engines match what is in the link, with the subject on the page.example: click here for our Search Engine Optimization Services.
- Offsite SEO: Someone told you that hundreds or thousands of backlinks were the key to SEO nirvana right? Well to be sure, backlinks are important, as it was one of the founding factors Google was based on. And yet we have the knowledge that there are over 200 criteria that Google uses to determine rank. Furthermore I have seen sites that have been active for years with tens of thousands backlinks still not rank well because they do not sufficiently cover other ranking factors. Which leads us squarely back to that all things being equal statement I keep saying.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations // Action 5: Now lets look for ways to bolster our backlink strategy. Ask your community partners to provide backlinks, but have them do so on relevant pages. Encourage existing businesses and other stakeholders to have individual pages that make sense to be linking to and from. A giant page of links might be ok, but a page that is about XYZ uses our materials like this, is far better. Get into social media and tell the world about your new articles. A common mistake is linking to your home page, and while that is desirable in many instances, don’t forget to send people to inside pages that are more relevant.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: A long time ago a client mentioned that they seen an abnormal spike in traffic in their analytics client. When asked what happen on that day, the client mentioned they had a story about them in the newspaper. Clearly the abnormal traffic was due to abnormal promotion. We want to look for successes so we can repeat them and failures so we can correct or avoid them. While it sounds geeky to discuss Google A/B or multivariate testing, this will not lead to conclusive results for clients with low traffic volume. It certainly may not provide enough measurable change to warrant the cost of creating those changes. This in no way means we should not constantly be testing for improvement. We can as an alternative look to landing page effectiveness, conversion funnels, bounce rates, time on site, and many other types of clues in order to fine tune ROI. We can also use the new Google Analytics annotation feature so you can look back and recall what caused a spike in traffic.
- SEO // Action 6: This would be a great time to input keywords you have selected based on validation efforts earlier into a tool like Rank Checker, a Firefox add-on, to establish a baseline for both your site, and that of your competitors. It is FAR from perfect but you can watch trends!When checking rankings use: IE = “InPrivate Browsing”, Firefox =“start private browsing “ , Chrome =“incognito”, Opera = “new private tab”, to avoid personalized results.You will also want to express the need for everyone in the company to be committed to monitoring contacts, calls, and lead sources for clues on what is working so you can do it again.
- SEO for Economic Development Organizations: Co-Presented by Kevin Mullett for Director of Product Development for Cirrus ABS. You can find Kevin: http://www.kevinmullett.com (blog), http://twitter.com/kmullett (twitter), http://www.facebook.com/kevinmullett (facebook), and on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmullettKevin is here to help with any detailed questions you may have.
- We’ll be doing these webinars every other week in the future, so mark your calendars. We’re tentatively scheduled to tackle the subject of analytics next time and social media at the end of December. If you have suggestions for a topic you’d like for us to cover, just let us know at dpillie@cirrusabs.com
- We at Cirrus ABS appreciate you taking the time to learn how to improve your internet marketing efforts. Please let us know how we can help you and if you liked this seminar please remember to sign up for our next webinar!Please type in any questions you have and we’ll be glad to answer them!