Chapter 6
Get Found in Google

How many times did you use Google to look for something today? Chances are, several times. In fact, every day, there are approximately 5.9 billion Google searches. It's likely that amongst all those billions of searches, some were related to your product or service. Simply put, if your site isn't being found on Google, you're missing a major opportunity to generate leads for your business. In fact, you're probably sending these leads to your competitors!

Other than the sheer volume of potential visitors you can draw through Google, there's another important consideration for ensuring your site ranks well: People searching on Google are actually looking for something. This may sound a bit obvious, but contrast this to getting traffic from blogs. Blog readers are often focused on learning something or being entertained. They often don't have a specific goal. Google searchers, on the other hand, are looking for something. Sometimes they are searching for a product or service. Sometimes they're searching for information. But, they do have a specific goal. If what they are searching for is related to your business, you want to be found.

Paid versus Free

When users conduct Google searches, two kinds of results appear on the SERP (search engine results page): the “organic” search results (also known as “natural” results) and the paid or sponsored results. Generally, the paid results, or Sponsored Links, appear on the right side of the SERP, and sometimes at the top (see Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Screen Shot of Organic and Sponsored Google Search Results

These Sponsored Links are essentially advertising—which is why the Sponsored Links are often referred to as “pay per clicks ads.” Organizations can bid for placement in Google search results by purchasing Google AdWords, a pay per click (PPC) advertising program. Here's how it works: You offer to pay Google a certain cost per click (CPC) anytime your ad is shown to searchers based on what keyword they searched on. You pay for how often people click on your ad and visit your website—not how often your ad is shown (impressions). For example, say you were a tax attorney in Boston and wanted to reach Google users that searched on the term “Boston Tax Attorney.” You could buy that Google AdWord and offer $2.50 per click. This means that if your ad is shown to users, you pay Google $2.50 every time someone clicks on your ad. The price that you offer (or bid) determines whether your ad will be shown, where it will be shown, and how many times. The price that you need to pay depends on how many other people are also interested in that same keyword. Google AdWords is an auction that's held in real-time. Those companies willing to pay more are more likely to get their ad shown in the limited amount of real estate Google has available for these paid AdWords ads. It's important to note that Google also uses the quality of an ad, in addition to the bid price, to determine ad placement. High quality ads that meet the needs of searchers can pay less on a per-click basis.

That's how paid search works. You pay Google to send visitors to your website, and how much you pay is based on how many other people are competing for those same searchers.

On the other hand, the organic or natural results are not based on payment, but on the quality of the content and what Google believes would be the most valuable pages for their users. When your web page shows up in the organic results, and users click on your link and visit your web page, these clicks are essentially free (you don't pay anything to Google when people click on a link to your site). Clearly, all things being equal, you'd rather your business get visitors from Google for free, wouldn't you? It actually gets even better than that. Not only is placement in the organic results free, but visitors click on these results much more often than they do the paid results. Research from MarketingSherpa and Enquiro show that 75 percent of searchers click the organic listings while 25 percent click on the paid results.¹ This means you'll likely get much more traffic if you can rank for certain keywords organically than if you were to try to buy your way into the paid results for those same words.

Clearly, you'd prefer to get free traffic instead of paying for it. That's what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. You want to increase the chances your web pages will show up as high as possible in the Google results when a user searches for a keyword related to your business.

By default, when users type a search term into Google, 10 results or listings are shown per page. This means the first page of results shows the top 10 results, the second page shows the next 10 results, and so on. It's important to note that getting on the first page of Google is very important, because the first page gets a lion's share of the traffic for that keyword. A recent study shows that Google's first page captures over 89 percent of the traffic, and most users will not look beyond the first page. Even within the first page, the traffic is not spread evenly—the top-ranked result (number one on the first page) captures about 42 percent of the traffic. The higher you rank for a given term, the more visitors to your website, and the difference between the number of visitors does not occur in small increments—it's significant. So, you want to do your best to rank as high as possible for the keyword that you care about.

The practice of understanding how search engines work, and striving to get a website to rank well for keywords, is known as search engine optimization (SEO). The rest of this chapter looks at the basics of SEO and how you can leverage this practice to get more visitors to your website.

A (Brief) Introduction to How Google Works

To succeed with search engine optimization, and rank for keywords you care about, it's necessary to understand a little about how Google works.

Google does two basic things. First, it crawls the Internet looking for web pages, storing these pages in its index. Think of the Google index as a massive catalog (much like a library would have a catalog of every book). Second, it has software that processes user searches and finds the best matching web pages from its index.

In order for your web page to rank well in Google for a given keyword, two things need to happen. First, Google needs to crawl and index your web page. If your web page isn't being crawled, you're not even in the race! Then, of all the possible web pages that Google thinks is a match for the keyword being searched, your page or pages have to be considered better than the other possible candidates.

Getting Google to visit a web page and index it is not as hard to do as it once was. In the early days of SEO, it was often necessary to manually submit new web pages to Google and the other search engines so they would know these pages existed. Many SEO consultants and software tools offered this as a service called search engine submission. Today, manual submission of pages is rarely necessary. Instead, simply getting a link to a new web page from a page that is already being crawled by Google is sufficient to get the new page crawled as well. That's how most new pages get into the Google index today. If you do decide you want to manually submit your pages to Google, it's free and easy (and should not involve hiring a consultant). Just use the Google Add URL tool (www.Google.com/addurl).

Getting web pages indexed by Google is not the problem. Getting them to rank well is where the challenge is. To understand how to rank well, it's helpful to understand the basics of how the Google ranking algorithm works.

How Google's Brain Works

Let's dig into how Google's software brain works. We promise not to make it too technical, and you'll know enough to impress your friends and family at the next holiday party.

When a user types a keyword into Google's search box, Google first looks through the billions of pages in its index and comes up with a list of results that are matches for the term. For example, if you type inbound marketing into the Google search box, there are currently about 1,060,000 pages that Google finds related to that term. Once Google has this list of pages, it sorts the list so the highest-quality results are at the top of the list and the lowest-quality results are at the bottom.

Ranking is based on a combination of two things, relevance and authority. The relevance is a measure of how close of a match a given web page is to the term being searched. This is based on factors such as the title tag (sometimes called the “page title”), the page content, and the anchor text of links to the page. The authority of a page is a measure of how important and authoritative that given page is in the eyes of Google.

The authority of a web page is at the heart of the Google algorithm. Google calls this authority PageRank™, named for Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. The idea behind PageRank is brilliantly simple and based on work at Stanford University on how to measure the credibility and importance of academic papers. The authority of a given academic paper can be determined by the number of other papers that cite and reference it. The more citations a given paper has, the better the paper. However, not all citations are created equal. A citation from another paper that itself has a high number of citations is considered to carry more weight. High-authority papers are cited by other high-authority papers. It is this same principle that drives Google's PageRank, but instead of academic papers, it's about web pages. And instead of citations, it's about links from other web pages. The authority of a web page is calculated based on the number of inbound links from other web pages and the authority of those pages.

Here's a simple example. Let's say you've created a web page about the best restaurants in Boston. If your page is just sitting out there, and nobody is linking to it, Google assigns a relatively low authority score to your page. This is not surprising. Google has no evidence that you know what you're talking about or that your content is of high quality. Over time, a few other bloggers find your web page and link to it from their pages. This causes your authority to increase. The more powerful the web pages that link to you, the more your authority goes up. Now, if someday, Boston.com (the website for the Boston Globe) links to your page, your authority goes up significantly. Why? Because Boston.com itself is a high-authority website.

So, to get SEO authority, the name of the game is to get as many links as possible from as many high-authority sites as possible. How do you get links? By creating remarkable content.

Search engine optimization when done well is not about tricking Google into ranking your web page. It's about creating content that users would want to find and helping Google deliver great search results. The best way to rank well in the Google search results is to create content that is rank-worthy. By rank-worthy, we mean content that is worthy of being ranked because it is what the user who is searching would consider to be of high quality and relevance.

Picking the Perfect Keywords

The first step in search engine optimization is deciding which keywords to optimize your site for. Keywords are what users type into the search box for their search query. Three primary criteria go into selecting the right keywords to optimize your website: relevance, volume, and difficulty.

Relevance

You want to pick keywords related to your business. When crafting your list of possible keywords, it is best to think from the prospect's perspective. Try to think about what keywords a prospect looking for your product or service is likely to type into Google. Come up with many different variations.

Estimated Search Volume

Even if you get the number one spot in the Google search results for a keyword, it doesn't guarantee you're going to get lots of visitors to your website. The amount of traffic you will drive to your website is dependent on how many people search on that keyword. To pick great keywords, you need to have a sense for the approximate number of times users search for that word in Google. Check the resources section at the end of the book for information on tools you can use to help with determining search volume for keywords.

Difficulty

This is a measure of how hard it will be to rank for the keyword, based on the strength of the competition and your own website's authority. Ranking well in Google is a competition. Of the thousands of web pages trying to rank for a given keyword, only 10 can make it to the front page. So, if you have a new website and are trying to break in to the top 10, you'll have to displace someone else. For some keywords, this is relatively easy to do, if the existing top 10 are relatively weak. For competitive keywords, the strength of the competition may be high, and ranking on the first page may be very difficult.

Picking the best keywords is an exercise in balancing these three factors: relevance, search volume, and difficulty. You shouldn't just solve for one factor. For example, picking a relevant keyword that has very high search volume is not going to mean much if the difficulty is so high that you'll never be able to rank. Similarly, picking very easy words that have very weak competition is not going to generate much traffic if only a few people a month use that term to search.

When picking your keywords, you should start with a list of relevant keywords for your business. Then, determine what the estimated volume is for those keywords and how much competition there is for that keyword. If you're just getting started, you should probably begin with keywords that have relatively low competition. If your website doesn't have much authority yet in the eyes of Google, you're unlikely to rank well for a highly competitive keyword. In addition, if you don't make it into the first page of the search results, you are not likely to get much traffic from those keywords. Choose keywords that have relatively low competition instead. Then, as you build authority for your web pages, and start ranking for these keywords, you can move up to higher volume keywords that have more competition.

When coming up with your initial list of keyword candidates, it is important to think from the viewpoint of your potential customers. Don't just think about how you would describe your business, think about what users searching for your business might type into Google. For example, you might describe yourself as “interior design for businesses.” You'd then come up with several variations on interior design, and maybe even interior decoration (because users often confuse the two). However, perhaps some of your potential customers don't use the phrase “interior design.” Instead, they might use “office space design.” The key is to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer. A very effective way to know how your customers might search for you is to watch them. If you have an existing website that gets traffic from Google, you can use analytics software to see what terms visitors are already using to get to your site. This doesn't work well if your site is poorly optimized and the only traffic you're getting from Google are people searching on your company name. In most cases, looking at this kind of data yields new insights into potential keywords that you can add to your list.

Using PPC for Better Data

If you have even a modest budget, you should consider launching a small PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaign to determine what your best keywords might be. This is particularly useful if you are just getting started and don't know which keywords will work. When you run a PPC campaign, you can pick a set of keywords and begin generating traffic almost immediately. Often, with SEO, it can take weeks or months before you rank well enough for certain keywords to see any traffic. Further, you can channel the traffic to a specific web page, such as a landing page (discussed later). This way, you can measure what the conversion rate is for traffic from various keywords. The benefit of getting this conversion data is that you can make even better decisions as to which keywords to pick. Remember, the purpose of inbound marketing is not just to get more traffic to your website, but to convert more of that traffic into qualified leads and customers.

On-Page SEO: Doing the Easy Stuff First

Once you've picked your list of target keywords, the next step is to start using these keywords on your website.

On-page factors that influence rankings are those contained within the page that you are trying to rank. These are factors that you can control directly by modifying your web pages and as such, are the easiest factors to address to improve your SEO.

The Power of the Page Title Tag

Of the elements on the page that influence Google, by far, the most important is the page title. The page title is what shows up at the top of the browser window (and is used for the text of the link in search results). In Figure 6.2, the page title tag is shown above the URL at the top (“Content Distribution Management software—Signiant”).

Figure 6.2 Screen Shot of Page Title on Google

Given the importance of the Page Title tag to SEO, it's worth spending a fair amount of time crafting great titles for your most important pages. The home page of your website is a great place to start, since it likely has the most SEO authority. However, don't stop there. Look for deeper pages in your website that are important and optimize the titles for those pages too. For most businesses, the traffic potential of these deep pages when added up is significant.

Tips from the Trenches for Page Titles

Here are four tips on writing great page titles:

1. Put your most important keywords in your Page Title. Too many websites fail to use the power of the Page Title in helping with their SEO. This is such an easy win. Make sure your Page Titles contain your most important keywords.
2. Earlier words in the Page Title carry more weight than later words, so put your most important words first. For example, instead of “User Friendly Inventory Management Software,” try “Inventory Management Software That's User Friendly.” The term “inventory management” is probably more important (from a search ranking perspective) than “user friendly.”
3. Don't forget the humans! The goal is not just to rank for your important keywords, but to actually have visitors click through to your website. If your Page Title sounds like nonsense, written more for a computer than for a human, people are unlikely to click on it. Make sure your Page Title tag is something that users will want to click on when they see it in the search results.
4. When picking the Page Title tag for your home page, consider putting your company name at the end of the title. This allows your most important keywords to have more weight.

Adding an Effective Description

Similar to the page title, the meta description tag is information about a web page. It is usually a brief summary of what a user can expect to see on a page. Also like the page title, the meta description is included in special HTML code in the page and doesn't show up in the browser like the rest of the content.

From an SEO perspective, the meta description doesn't impact search rankings in any of the major search engines. So, including your keywords in the meta description will not help your rankings. However, the meta description is important because although the engines don't use it for rankings, they do often use it within the search results page. The description (or a portion thereof) is often included below the page title. By writing a compelling and accurate description for the page, you are more likely to get clicks from web users. (See Figure 6.3.)

Figure 6.3 Page Description in Search Results

Here are three tips for writing your page descriptions:

1. Keep them short (one to two sentences) and no more than 160 characters, because Google truncates long descriptions.
2. Every page should have a unique description (just like it should have a unique page title).
3. Use your keywords in your description. Google will often show the matching keywords from the search query as bold in the description. Having your keywords shown in this way increases the chances that users will click on your link in the results.

Optimizing URLs

Every publicly accessible resource on the Internet has a unique URL which is basically the Internet address of the page. (In case you were wondering, URL stands for “Uniform Resource Locator.”)

Here are some sample URLs:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url
2. www.hubspot.com/cmos-guide-to-brand-journalism

Most modern content management systems will let you customize the URLs for your web pages. You should take advantage of this feature and optimize your URLs from an SEO perspective. When Google crawls a web page, it looks at the URL as one of the factors it considers to determine the relevance of a web page for a given keyword. In the HubSpot example above, note that both the words “CMO” and “brand” are in the URL. If a user is searching on Google for the term “CMO branding guide,” this keyword-rich URL sends a subtle signal to Google that this is likely what the page is about, in addition to looking at other things like the page title and content. Second, when users link to your website, they often just copy/paste the URL into their web pages and do not go to the trouble of specifying the anchor text. In these cases, the URL often becomes the anchor text. If you have your target keywords in the URL itself, you'll have a higher chance of getting anchor text with those keywords when people link to your page.

Domain Names and SEO

A topic that comes up frequently when discussing URLs is the importance of the domain name. The domain name is that part of the URL that is shared by all other pages on the site (for example, hubspot.com and inbound.org are both domain names). Since the domain name is part of all URLs on a given website, it is often useful to have a keyword contained within your domain name. The reason is simple, since all of your URLs contain your domain name, any keywords that are in your domain name automatically become part of all of your URLs. This is why keyword-rich domain names have long been so popular. The question is, should you change your domain name so that it contains one or more of your most important keywords? It depends. For a business website, the domain name should likely match the name of the business. If the business happens to contain a descriptive keyword, then you're fine. If not, it's unlikely that you want to change the name of the website and the business, simply to get a keyword-rich domain. Further, if you do decide to change your domain name, it will take some time and effort to reclaim any SEO authority you have built on the old domain name. Tread lightly here. We've gone through this process several times and it always has its challenges.

If you do want to use a domain name that has one or more keywords in it (which may be the case if you're a startup and have not decided on a business name yet), keep these points in mind: The best domain names are those that are relatively short, unambiguously clear, and memorable. If you're running a business, you want to focus only on .com domain names. Though there are other top-level domains, such as .net, .biz, .info, and others, the .com extension is the de facto standard for businesses. A noteworthy exception is international domains such as .ca (Canada), .in (India), and others, which are common for businesses within their respective countries.

The pool of unregistered, high-quality .com domain names with specific keywords is very limited. There's now an after-market for domain names, where you can acquire domain names that have been previously registered by someone else. If you're looking for a very high-quality domain name, you're likely going to have to pay more than just the registration fee. Prices for domain names can vary significantly from hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you're starting a new business and traffic from search engines is extremely critical, you should consider creating your business name around a premium, high-quality domain name. Note however that over the years, Google has updated its search algorithm to reduce the impact of having keywords in a domain name. There was a time when an “exact match” domain (where the domain name matched exactly a specific search phrase) was an effective way to rise to the top of the search results. That is no longer the case. So, if you're investing in a premium domain name, do it for the brand value and the user experience—not search engine rankings.

Page Content

So far, we've talked about the page title and the page meta description. Both of these are stored in a separate part of the web page because they describe the page. Now, let's discuss the page content itself, the body of the page. There are several considerations to keep in mind here too, from an SEO perspective.

Headings

When creating a web page, you can put headings in the page content. Much like the headings in a book or newspaper article, a heading in a web page is used to help organize information and to help make the content easier to read. When a visitor is scanning through an article, the headings act as visual cues as to what she might expect to see. For example, an article in the Sunday paper about the most popular things to do in town might have subheadings such as “Museums,” “Theatre,” “Restaurants,” and “Sporting Events.” As you scan through this article, your eyes would quickly see the subheadings and know what you'd expect to find in the article. Google does something similar when reading your website. It looks at the headings in the page to determine what the page is about. This is why you should include your important keywords in the headings. When Google finds headings in your web page, it sees keywords in these headings as a signal that these words are important.

Just because some words look like a heading to people doesn't mean they look that way to Google. You must “tag” words on your pages so they look like headings to the search engines.

Tips from the Trenches for Headings

Follow these three tips for writing headings:

1. Use your important keywords in your heading.
2. Keep headings as short as possible so keywords get maximum weight (same principle as in the page title and URL).
3. Use a single h1 header on each page, and use multiple h2 and h3 headers.

Images

Many web pages also include images. Images are a great way to illustrate a point and make content more attractive and appealing. This is particularly true for long pieces of content with a lot of text. From an SEO perspective, one important thing to understand is that Google can't really “see” images, or any text that's in the image. For example, in Figure 6.4, though the words “Wall Street Journal” exist, they're part of a larger image so Google wouldn't really see those words.

Figure 6.4 Screen Shot of Multiple Images on a Web Page

If your web page content consists primarily of images that have text on them, Google will not really be able to interpret the text embedded in those images. As such, they're not signaling to Google as to what your website is about. A quick tip to determine whether certain text on a page is an image: Try to highlight the text with your mouse, as if you were going to copy/paste it. If you can't highlight the text, chances are it's an image and Google can't see it. To help with this, all important images on your web page should include what is known as an “alt” attribute. This is a special code that allows you to describe an image with text in a way that Google can see it. Also, like the URL of your web pages, the URL of your important images should contain your keywords.

Off-Page SEO: The Power of Inbound Links

Although the on-page SEO factors we discussed earlier are important and relatively easy to do, to make any significant improvement in rankings for your keywords you're going to need to address off-page factors as well. Off-page factors are those that are not on the pages you control but on other web pages. The most important off-page factor is inbound links. An inbound link is a link on another web page that points to your page. As discussed earlier, Google places a great deal of emphasis on the authority of a web page in determining search rankings. Authority is calculated based on the number of inbound links to your web page, and the authority of those pages linking to you.

The most effective way to get inbound links is by creating remarkable content that is useful and interesting. And, getting inbound links is the most effective way to get better rankings in Google.

Requesting Links from Others

One way to get links from other people is to contact them and request that they link to your site. This is often done through an e-mail to the website owner for a site that you'd like to get a link from. Although this can work in some situations, we're not big fans of the link-requesting model. It's hard to get great, high-quality links by requesting them from other people who don't know you. Like most site owners, we get requests for links all the time. We treat these link requests like spam messages—we delete them. Having said that, if you've created some exceptionally good content that you think would be beneficial to the readers of a particular site or blog, it is fine to reach out to them. When reaching out to bloggers or site owners, make sure the e-mail is highly personalized. Demonstrate that you read their site and understand their audience. Send a link to the content you think would be relevant for them. Usually, this is not your home page, but a deeper page, like a blog article. Finally, don't explicitly ask for a link. You're basically sharing information that you think they might find useful. If they like it and think it would be interesting to their audiences, they might link to it.

Measuring the Value of Inbound Links

With the proliferation of blogs and the comments left on those blogs, Google ran into an issue. Most blog comments allow the commenter to enter a URL that links back to a web page of their choice—usually the comment author's blog or company website. The problem was that this feature allowed any user to create an inbound link for themselves on any website that allowed user-submitted content, making life difficult for Google. The search engine could not distinguish legitimate inbound links, which were seen as an endorsement, and which could be used as a signal of quality for the page being linked to, and potentially low-quality links that the website owner didn't really create. To solve this, the “no-follow” attribute was created for links.

The no-follow attribute is information within the source code for a page that can be included on a link. When Google sees a link that is marked as a no-follow, it treats this as a signal that the site owner does not wish to pass SEO credit to the target page. Though users can still click on the link (it looks and behaves like any other link), it does not help the page being linked to from an SEO perspective. Today, most blogs automatically mark all links left within comments as no-follow. In fact, most software that allows user-generated content (content created by the general public, not by the site owner) will mark the links within this content to be no-follow.

It's important to recognize that spending lots of time creating content on other people's websites with the sole purpose of getting SEO value doesn't work very well. Most of those links will be no-follow and, as such, will not pass SEO credit.

So, how much is a given link worth from an SEO perspective? Many factors go into determining how much SEO authority you will receive from a given inbound link.

Factors That Affect Link Value

There are four factors that affect link value:

1. The authority of the page that the link is on. The higher the authority of the page, the more of this authority it can pass on to your web page.
2. Whether the link is a no-follow or a do-follow as discussed above.
3. The number of other links on the page linking to you. The more links that are on that page, the less SEO credit each link passes.
4. The anchor text of the link. This is the text that the user sees on the page and that is clickable. By default, anchor text shows up as underlined on most web pages. Links that have your desired keywords in the anchor text are the most valuable to you in terms of ranking for those keywords.

Black Hat SEO: How to Get Your Site Banned by Google

The terms “black hat” and “white hat” were derived from old western movies where the bad guys generally wore black hats and the good guys wore white hats. SEO experts constantly debate as to what practices are considered white hat versus black hat. In our mind, the big difference is that white-hat SEO helps Google deliver quality results to users by working within existing guidelines. On the other hand, black-hat SEO involves exploiting current limitations in Google's software to try and trick it into ranking a particular web page that would normally not have ranked.

Whatever you call them, you should avoid SEO practices that rely on tricking Google and distorting search results. Here's our rule of thumb: If a given technique is not improving the experience for a user, and it can be detected by a human doing a manual review, then it's probably a bad idea. It's safe to assume that if you try to exploit a hole in the Google software today, your advantage is going to be temporary. More importantly, you carry a significant risk of having your website penalized or banned completely from Google. The risk is not worth the reward.

Here are the techniques you should stay away from when optimizing your site for Google.

Link Farms

There's general consensus that one of the strongest influences on search rankings is the number and quality of inbound links to a web page. A link farm is a group of websites created for the primary purpose of creating a high number of links to a given web page. These websites are not real, and the links on them are not genuine signals of quality. They are often generated automatically by computers and their content is of minimal, if any, value.

Automated Content Generation/Duplication

Search engines like content. They particularly like frequently updated content. Unfortunately, creating unique content takes time and energy. In order to try to trigger search engine spiders to index more pages from a website and do so more frequently, some may try to autogenerate content or scrape content from other sites and republish it. This technique often goes hand-in-hand with link farms. That's because if you're creating thousands of sites, you need some content to put on them. Google has gotten very good at determining natural content versus content that is computer-generated gibberish with no value. As for duplicating content on other websites without permission, this is not only penalized by Google, it is often a violation of copyright laws.

Keyword Stuffing

This practice involves overpopulating certain portions of a web page with a set of keywords in the hope that it will increase the chances that Google will rank the page for that keyword. Search engines caught on to this trick years ago, and it's no longer effective. Of course, this doesn't keep people from trying it.

Cloaking

This tactic involves delivering different website content to Google's search spider than what is delivered to human users. The usual motivation for this is to send the search engine crawlers content for ranking on a certain term—but send different content to real users. It's pretty easy for the search engines to detect this. If you're suspected of using cloaking, it's easy for someone (like a Google employee) to simply visit your website as a human and check if you're cloaking. This technique, when discovered, is one of the most reliable ways to get a site banned.

Hidden Text

This technique hides text on the web page. The idea is to include text so only Google can see it, but humans cannot. The simplest example is some variation of white text on a white background. This combination is not easily visible to human users, but from a computer's perspective, the content still exists. This technique is a bit harder for Google to detect, but not by any means impossible.

Doorway/Gateway Pages

This practice is similar to the cloaking technique. Instead of dynamically delivering different content to Google, a doorway page involves getting a given page to rank well in Google, but then redirecting human users to a different page. Clearly, this is not in the interests of end users, as they don't get the content they would have expected.

It's not smart to try to outsmart Google engineers. Just about all of these questionable tactics presume that the search engines will not detect them and are based on exploiting currently presumed (and perhaps even nonexistent) limitations of search engine algorithms. We'd argue that Google as a company is pretty smart and spends considerable resources updating its algorithm. An Internet strategy that's predicated on outsmarting Google is not a smart one.

For most marketers, the time and energy spent on trying to take these shortcuts is much better invested in improving the company website and content so that it deserves to be ranked highly, and helping the search engines discover this content for the benefit of users. Working with search engines instead of trying to exploit them is the only approach to SEO that works in the long-term.

The Dangers of PPC

We've talked a fair amount about organic rankings and how to effectively approach SEO. But, we haven't spent a lot of time talking about paid search via PPC.

PPC advertising has proven to be an effective way for many marketers to drive targeted traffic to their websites. However, there's long-term risk in becoming too reliant on PPC for traffic. The problem is that because PPC programs like Google's AdWords act as a real-time auction, it is possible for the cost per click (CPC) to rise unexpectedly.

Let's look at a concrete example of this. Say you're buying clicks for “wedding caterers San Francisco” and you're paying about $2.50 a click. You've analyzed the data and have determined that at this price, the clicks are worth it because the value of the leads generated from these clicks exceeds the cost. Now, things are going along just fine and then one morning, you find that your CPC has risen to over $3.00, a 20 percent increase. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but the most common is that there is suddenly new competition that is interested in that same word, and they're willing to pay more. Even if you're a PPC expert, there's little you can do to prevent others bidding up the price. You are vulnerable because the price changes constantly based on competition. Your prices can spike and do so very quickly. Contrast this to how SEO works. If you make an investment in ranking for your top keywords in the organic listings, it is much less likely that a new market entrant that doesn't understand the business is going to be able to displace you quickly and take away the traffic you are getting. Organic listings are usually not achieved by new entrants that are just getting started. Even throwing money at it (as they can do in PPC) doesn't work very well. And, even if this new competitor does ultimately beat you in the organic rankings, it will likely happen over time. You can watch the rankings for your top keywords and see if competitors are gaining ground.

So, our advice is to appropriately balance your investment in PPC and SEO. In the early days of building web traffic, it might be necessary to buy traffic. Or, you might be running a short campaign to collect valuable data about which keywords work. However, over time, you should work towards establishing your organic rankings. This investment has a better rate of return in the long-term and is much more defensible.

Tracking Your Progress

Tracking your progress in terms of rankings is an important part of SEO—and it's relatively easy.

Use the free Website Grader (grader.com) tool and create a custom report for your website. It will give you a lot of useful information, find problems, and give you suggestions to fix them. Make a note of what your score is, follow the suggestions, and regularly monitor your grade over time. website Grader looks at several different factors and gives you a higher-level view of how your website is doing.

One of the data points you should check is how many of your site's pages are in the Google index. If the number of indexed pages seems lower than you expect (or zero), there's likely some problem with your site architecture and Google is not seeing all of your web pages.

Monitor the number of inbound links you are getting to your website. As we've discussed earlier, your Google rankings depend a lot on the number and quality of links you are getting. You should be working to get this number higher and higher.

Track a list of your favorite keywords (those that have the right mix of relevance, high search volume, and low difficulty) and see how your rankings are doing. You'll find that you do better for some words than others. Start looking for patterns. Pay particular attention to which web pages on your site are starting to rank. These pages are important assets because Google is sending you a message (by ranking those pages) that they are gaining authority.

Most importantly, track your actual results. How many visitors are coming to your website through organic search? How many became leads? For bonus points, implement a closed-loop reporting system and track how many of these leads converted into customers. (Closed loop means you track a new customer from initial inquiry to closed sale.)

Inbound in Action: LinkedIn “Elite”

Inbound isn't just about attracting a new audience. It's also about keeping your current audience actively engaged. LinkedIn understands this need as well as any organization.

The company needed to find ways to remind its members to return to LinkedIn—to augment their profiles, discover a presentation on newly acquired SlideShare, or stumble upon a job (better still, an advertisement for a job)—regularly, not just when they are conducting an active employment search. But what could it offer that would draw a meaningful number of its members back to the social network?

Rather than produce a piece of content or develop an online tool, the company provided a more elemental value: an ego stroke.

When LinkedIn logged its 200 millionth member, instead of issuing a self-congratulatory press release, it congratulated its most influential members. The company e-mailed a note to the previous year's top 1, 5, and 10 percent most-viewed profiles. The message thanked those members for playing a “unique part” in the LinkedIn community.

The value of the message was multifold. It not only reminded its most popular members to re-engage with LinkedIn, but it also motivated them to share their accomplishment across various social networks, drawing in their circles of influence.

It might have only been a simple e-mail, but the right message at the right time to the right audience can be a powerful inbound lure.

To Do

1. Run your website through grader.com. Follow the suggestions.
2. Discover which of your pages are the most powerful.
3. Optimize the page titles of your most important pages (like your home page).
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Note

1. Organic versus paid search; www.hubspot.com/organic-vs-paid-search/; www.enquiroresearch.com/eyetracking-report.aspx.