How Will Secure Search Change Small Business SEO?

Google has started redirecting people who log into their Google accounts before searching to a new, more secure form of Google search. The difference is a small as an s: it’s https://www.google.com instead of http://www.google.com — but the effects the change has on the searching process are profound to everything except the searcher.

If you run a search on the new secure Google, you won’t notice any difference at all — but the owners and users of first- and third-party applications ranging from Google Analytics to Market Samurai will. Those applications take information from Google’s database of searches and use them to tell various people about your Google searches. The new secure search prevents those applications from ever getting your data.

If you’ve got Analytics, for example, and someone uses Google to get to your site, you’ll learn that they did so — but you won’t get to see what search term they used to get there. If you use Market Samurai, you won’t see the missing data, but the data that you don’t see will be incomplete — because whatever small percentage of people that are using the secure search don’t have their data counted by MSam’s keyword research module.

So what does this have to do with small business SEO? Pretty simple: even if all your doing is basic local internet marketing, you still need to know which keywords to target. As secure searches become more and more common (and Google has said outright that this is one of their goals!), obtaining the information you need to properly target keywords is going to get more and more difficult.

That said, this isn’t something that should be blown out of proportion. To a degree, local internet marketing isn’t ever that hard — if you sell martial arts supplies to a small down like Aptos, CA, the keywords “sparring equipment Aptos” or “Aptos ninja gear” are always going to be safe bets. It’s only for the long-tail keywords, particularly pay-per-click marketing long-tail keywords, that will really suffer — making PPC an even worse bet for small businesses than it is today.

Quick Links Like Forum Posting Or Slow Links like Article Writing and Distribution?

Last week, we mentioned a divide between two different kinds of links in the SEO world. Since then, we’ve gotten several Emails from interested readers who wanted us to explore that difference in a little bit more detail. Here goes.

Quick Links
The first category of backlinks are the ‘quick links’ — links that take very little creativity, time, or even expertise to generate. These are links like the ones you get from forum posting, social bookmarking, RSS aggregation, directory submission, and blog commenting.

The goal of a quick link is to get a backlink pointing from a unique root domain that you’re not already linked to — all other elements of the backlink are secondary. It’s nice if you can control your anchor text, your link context, your LSI, and all of that — but it’s not necessary. The simple fact that there’s a new root domain on your list of “root domains that are linked to my page” is the goal.

You can get quick links from almost anywhere — even most SEO-ignorant stay-at-home moms can be trained in the art of quick link building in a matter of hours. The important attributes of a quick-linker are a long attention span, an immunity to boredom, and a resistance to carpal tunnel syndrome.

Slow Links
The second group are the ’slow links’ — links that get built at the rate of two per hour instead of twenty per hour. These links take a spark of creativity, because they need content in order to be built. Article writing and distribution, press releases, Web 2.0 properties, guest blog posts, and marketing videos are all slow links.

The thing about slow links is that they’re like the Swiss army knives of SEO: they do everything, and they do it all pretty well. A well-written slow link will give you:

• * A backlink — and usually one with decent authority and juice behind it.
• * A landing page from which potential customers can find you.
• * A public work that you can point to as evidence of your expertise and use as a tool to build your reputation.
• * A piece of content that other people might backlink to voluntarily, widening your sales funnel even further.

In the end, the best SEO strategies probably involve a bit of both kinds of links. Focus too much on quick links and you’ll lose to someone with a better reputation. Focus too much on slow links and someone with a mountain of quick links will outrank you. A divided approach is the best answer for most companies.

Article Writing and Distribution Is The First Step in Online Reputation Management

Article writing and distribution does a lot of good things for a website. It creates powerful backlinks, it drives mad traffic all by itself — and if you hire a spinner to multiply your articles, it’s a great form of affordable SEO. But one thing that many novice webmasters miss out on entirely is the ability of a solid set of articles to create an online reputation for an individual or a business.

Think about it — if you go to an article repository and you see three dozen articles by the same guy on several different aspects of the same detailed subject — let’s say it’s Italian art. Furthermore, each of these articles links to one of two pages on a website all about Italian art. You can scan these articles and find technical terms and details that clearly demonstrate that this guy knows a hell of a lot more than you do about Italian art. And, of course, the website he links to clearly indicated that he is the owner of the site and it’s attached business.

You walk away from that experience with the understanding that if you ever have a question about Italian art, that dude — and that website — are your go-to sources of information. You’ve just been hit by the online reputation building power of article writing and distribution.

On the other hand, the inverse is also entirely possible. If you submit a boatload of articles that are full of bad grammar, incorrect facts, and a childish tone of voice, you can utterly destroy your online credibility. It’s a double-edged sword. That means it’s worth a lot of time and energy to get your few articles done well — and also worth a little extra cash to hire a high-quality article spinner, and a top-tier distribution expert.

Some people have decided that the possibility of a negative impact is so great that they’d rather just skip out on the article marketing part of SEO altogether. On the other hand, if you love what you’re doing and you’re passionate enough to know the details, it should be easy for you to impress.

Need Money? Got a Website? SEO Turns Websites Into Money.

There’s a set of tools out there for everyone who wants to turn a profit with their website: SEO. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an umbrella term for any technique or system used to cause a website to rank more highly in the results pages for specific keywords.

For example, let’s say your website is all about Venezuelan Criollo cocoa beans and the chocolate that’s made from them. You might be on the 4th page of Google if you search for “Venezuelan chocolate”, the 2nd page for “Criollo beans”, and the 23rd page for “Criollo chocolate”.

Anything that you can do to improve any of those ‘Xth’s up there falls under the desmesnes of SEO. Follow a variety of SEO techniques (on-page, off-page, backlink building are the categories, but there are a lot of specific items within each category. For example, on-page SEO means writing copy with an eye toward keyword density; it means watching the contents of your metatags, and it means adhereing to the customer-oriented philosophy of the latest Google requirements.

The result of a few months’ SEO work is the eventual ascension of your website onto the first page of Google for some of your choicest keywords. That, in turn, will cause an explosion of traffic to your site, which you can then turn into money using a variety of techniques from AdSense to affiliate sales to selling, say, Criollo cocoa beans through the mail.

Without traffic, you have no visitors to monetize. Without SEO, you can’t get respectable levels of traffic — unless you replace SEO with some other traffic system, all of which require significant upfront investment (advertising) and/or have a profound potential to fail and cost you a load of money with no real benefit (pay per click marketing).

So website owners who want to turn their sites into cash are left with two options: spend money getting professional <a href="There's a set of tools out there for everyone who wants to turn a profit with their organic SEO performed by a respectable SEO company, or do it themselves. Either way will eventually work (assuming in the latter case they do it right), but the point is that if you want to make money on your site, get to know SEO — it’s how websites turn into money.

Thinking Rich And The True Meaning of Affordable SEO

There’s a reason why most Internet Marketing forums and websites have just as much time devoted to financial or business self-help as they do to details like mobile website design — it’s because getting started in an online business takes a particular kind of attitude. Or rather, it takes a specific kind of attitude to succeed.

The chief attribute of people who succeed online is that they think ‘rich’. In other words, they know the value of their money, and they don’t waste it. They know the difference between an asset (something that creates more money) and a liability (something that costs money.) The famous example is a car — many people think of a car as an asset, but it’s a liability, because it costs money (gas, repairs, etc.) without making money (except when you sell it, but even then it won’t make nearly as much as it cost.)

SEO can be either an asset or a liability, depending on a lot of circumstances. You can pay a company to get you ranked for the wrong keywords, or you can pay them to get you ranked and then not have a website that converts traffic into sales. On the other hand, you could turn over a small fortune and find that you’ve earned it back at the end of the month because you got a flood of visitors and turned it to a continuous stream of sales.

What does it mean, then, to have affordable SEO? It certainly doesn’t mean the absolute cost of the operation, because if the work fails, it doesn’t matter if you spent $5 or $5000 — your RoI is zero. When it comes to SEO, affordability is answered by one simple question: did it make you more money than it cost?

The question is harder to answer than it seems, because SEO is cumulative. Your first few months of SEO might seem like total flops, but then in the third month it picks up and by the seventh month you’ve made quadruple your total investment and you’re still building on that.

People who think rich look for a company who can do SEO right — who has a reputation for doing SEO right — and then they commit with the understanding that in the end, their expenses will be more than paid back. In the end, they are the ones who succeed.

The Latest Changes to the Rules of Organic SEO

Organic SEO is changing even as we sit back and try to keep up. Google released a new algorithm called Panda in March, and has updated it several times since then — and Panda has changed everything. Until Panda, it was enough to follow a complex but definable set of rules regarding everything from keyword placement and density to creating a natural link profile.

Today, however, there is an art to SEO that simply didn’t exist before. That’s because Panda suddenly put rules in place that takes the “user experience” into account. For example,

EzineArticles.com used to look like this:

And now, it looks like this:

See the difference? The largest and most profitable article directory on the Internet did away with two navbars, and 3 different blocks of AdWords because Panda slapped them downward in the rankings until they complied. Their profitability is down because the AdWords are gone, but the other choice was to have it tanked completely because their pages simply wouldn’t show up on any search engine results pages.

Why did this happen? Simple: because according to Panda, your user experience sucks if you have a bunch of crap interrupting or distracting from your main content. There exceptions; Panda loves social bookmarking buttons and other ’share-me’ stuff and won’t penalize you if you’ve got it alongside your content, for example. But by and large, modern SEO means creating clean, easy-to-use pages just as much as it means creating keyword-dense, heavily-backlinked pages.

But wait — there’s more. Panda doesn’t just check your content pages for user experience. It checks every single page on your site and gives your entire site a weighted ‘usability score’ — which means that your entire site can get penalized if just one or two heavily-visited pages have a poor user experience.

What that means for SEO in the modern world is profound, because Google is now forcing us to juggle between satisfying the demands of Panda and being able to effectively monetize our sites — how easy that ends up being has yet to be seen.

First Page Placement is Within Your Grasp

When you just start to get a website off the ground, the notion of getting your site first page placement for even a few keywords can sound like pie in the sky. Truth be told, however, it’s both easier — and harder — than you might think. That’s because there are multiple ways to get that first page placement, but none of them are entirely without complexity.

Organic SEO
The first route is your standard organic SEO magic: you build a vast array of backlinks. You make sure you present a natural backlink profile from a wide variety of websites, including directories, articles, blog comments, social bookmarks, web 2.0 properties, and more. The process takes an immense investment in time, not just in terms of man-hours, but in terms of allowing months to pass in order to convince the search engines that your site isn’t just a fad.

Organic SEO is complicated because there are a lot of ways to screw it up. You have to know the basic process of building backlinks, but that’s just the beginning. An artificial link profile (i.e. all of your links traceable to the same IP address; all of your links appearing around the same time of day/days of week; etc.) is a surefire way to get all of your work undone in a hurry, and it’s hardly the only one. With Google’s new Panda update, you have to worry about details like how your page looks to incoming visitors as well.

Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay per click marketing — also known euphemistically as ’sponsored placement’ — are the ads you see at the top of each SERPs page that aren’t the natural results. Every search engine has them, and anyone willing to bid on the keywords can get their site listed in them. Of course, it’s not an easy process to wrap your mind around, much less explain in a few words.

The key to doing PPC correctly is to not do it at all. If you’re going to rely on PPC marketing to get your traffic flowing to your site, just bite the bullet and hire a qualified PPC management firm. These people know the pay-per-click game inside and out, and the fees they charge are nothing compared to the money you’ll lose if you try to get into the PPC game unaided.

In short, first page placement is right there for you to have — but be prepared to work with the experts to get there, plain and simple.