The Forge

Google just announced the inclusion of real time search results that include Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and a number of blogs on their results pages.  This news isn’t shocking, as Google was a step behind Bing to tap the real time web and pretty much obligated to take a stab at it.

This is some big news, given that Google is by far the most utilized search engine.  One affected eco-system will be the realm of Search Engine Optimization.  While the old method of SEO primarily targets the ’static web,’ a new brand of Real Time SEO needs to evolve to address the ‘real time web’.

Real Time SEO

SEO is essentially maximizing the potential of a website to be indexed by Google based on a number of factors the algorithm takes into account when ranking sites, including the number of incoming links, title tags, keywords,  updated content, etc.

The Mountain View crew claims that real time search will utilize factors such as “author quality,” “probability of relevance” and “query hotness,” in order to determine which results pop.   These new factors, among others, will be the guiding principles of real time SEO, a process that is sure to be exacted from this point forward.

Sure, the social web – including twitter, facebook, myspace, and blog articles – have been an integral piece of SEO work for some time now. Utilizing social media pathways to provide extended exposure to a website has been important.  However, these efforts have always been somewhat ephemeral in comparison to the bulk of a search engine optimization campaign.  With the advent of Google’s real time web, this is about to change.

Real time search results could bring as much, if not more, traffic to a website than standard indexing on any given day.  This means making a website relevant and fresh through updates will become even more important.  There are sure to be other tactics and strategies that emerge as real time search evolves.  I’ll  be sure to keep an eye out for these results and post the findings.  In the meantime, feel free to let me know your thoughts on the subject!

Researching and choosing your site’s target keywords is the first step to SEO success.   In a sense, keywords are the DNA of your master SEO plan; keywords will be the blueprint of where your site gets indexed and what type of customers are visiting you.   It may seem fairly simple – choose the keywords that best suit your industry.  However, there are several factors that must be considered and compromises that must be taken to target the perfect keywords.  I’d like to briefly analyze what factors should be taken into account when choosing your site’s keywords.

1.  Local or Not: Is your business local or not?  If you are a Napa Valley Winery, it doesn’t make sense to target the single word ‘winery’.  Although ‘Winery’ may have more monthly search traffic than ‘Napa Valley Winery,’ the competition will be much stiffer and the ROI much smaller.  On the flip side, if your website is selling a broader online product, like ‘MMA Shorts’ than it wouldn’t make sense to include a specific location (unless you had a brick and mortar store front you were promoting).

2.  Monthly Search Traffic: You can easily find the monthly search traffic for various keywords using Google’s keyword tool.   Search traffic should be a primary factor in determining which keywords to target.  If you have a super specific product, like ‘eco-friendly puppy treats’ you will probably find out that those specific keywords get nearly zero search traffic.  This probably means you want to broaden your keyword to something that gets more searches, like ‘puppy treats’.

3.  Keyword Connotations: Even after determining the monthly search traffic of your target keywords, be sure to actually search for them on Google to see what results come up.  Certain keywords may have various connotations which you hadn’t previously thought of.   Make sure that the competitors on the 1st page of results are in your industry wheelhouse.

4. Competitors: It never hurts to check out what your competitors on the 1st page of search results for your keywords are doing.  View their website’s page source to see if there is any secret sauce of keyword variations that you haven’t thought of yet.

5.  The SEO Compromise: When all is said and done, choosing the keywords that will give your website the best traffic is all about compromise.  If you aim too high at broad keywords that are incredibly competitive, the chances are you won’t break ground on them for quite a while (if ever).  If you aim too low at super-specific keywords that have nearly no traffic, you will likely see very little return on your SEO efforts. The key is finding the compromise in keywords that will provide your business the perfect amount of traffic meshed with the ideal type of traffic.

So you’ve taken the steps to hire an SEO firm for your business website – lets say you are based out of San Francisco.  Whether you are trying to climb above those pesky Yelp reviews, generate more leads, or simply want to get more eyes on a new special, you wanted to take the proper steps to drive more relevant traffic to your site.

Once the SEO site modifications have been made, the blog implemented and the  social media efforts ongoing, how do you know if it’s been successful?  As a San Francisco business owner, what measures can you take to ensure that you are getting your money’s worth?  I’d like to review several metrics and tools that can be used to gauge the ROI (Return on Investment) for your SEO campaign.

Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the king of all analytics programs, allowing you to simply and effectively track incoming visitors to your site.  Installing Analytics is the first step to measuring the success of your SEO campaign.  You can view various pinpoint statistics such as what browsers your site visitors are using and what content sources they are coming from.

To gauge your SEO campaign’s effectiveness, a key Analytics trend to keep your eye on is the ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘Keywords’ -> ‘Non-Paid’.  This will let you know what search engines and keywords people are coming from, how long they spend on site, what pages they view, as well as more helpful info.

To install Google Analytics follow the instructions on their guide here.

Calculate the Average Lifetime Value of Your Customer

Depending on your type of business, a potential customer can vary in substance and value. If you are a San Francisco deli, a customer is essentially someone that visits your website and then decides to go to your deli and buys a sandwich.  So your customer value would be the price of a sandwich in addition to factors like repeat business and word of mouth.

If you sell a software as a service (SaaS) package that charges customers per month, a customer would be someone that goes to your website and then signs up for your service.   To evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, you need to determine how much this new customer is worth for your business over time (lifetime value).   This value will help you going forward in calculating the value of an organic visitor.

Calculate the Value of an Organic Visitor

Calculating the value of an organic visitor to your site can be helpful in determining your SEO ROI.

Adwords Comparison

If you are already utilizing Adwords, you can easily compare how much you are spending per ad click vs. how much you are spending per organic click.  If you have conversion tracker installed on Adwords you should already know your cost per conversion.   If you are comfortable with this cost per conversion, you can determine that your cost per click (CPC) is in the right range as well.

Using Analytics, you can determine how many clicks you’ve received through organic search traffic over a given period of time for specific keywords.  Divide that number of clicks by the amount of capital you’ve spent on your SEO campaign and you have your organic cost per click.  Compare this CPC to your adwords CPC.

Keep in mind that comparing organic traffic to AdWords traffic is a rough way to estimate ROI as organic traffic generally has a higher conversion rate than Adwords  traffic.

Simpler Methods (like actually interacting with customers)

A simpler way to gauge the effectiveness of you SEO campaign is to talk to your customers.   Questions like ‘how did you find out about us’ can pay large dividends in evaluating the strength of your various marketing avenues.  If a good percentage of people are saying they Googled a specific keyword and found your site, you can be pretty sure that the SEO campaign has been successful thus far.

Photo by Esther Lin/STRIKEFORCE

The guys here at Insight Forge are all pretty big fans of mixed martial arts (UFC, Strikeforce, Pride, Dream etc.) and in particular of heavyweight champ Fedor Emelianenko.  I’m not sure who caught the recent Strikeforce broadcast on CBS, but it was pretty great to see “the Last Emperor” prove himself yet again with a 2nd round knockout of Brett Rogers.

Which brings me to the subject of MMA Marketing.  Because mixed martial arts is still a burgeoning sport many of the larger advertising agencies and web marketing firms haven’t yet caught onto how big MMA is going to be.  The sport has international appeal, is  immensely popular on all ends of the globe and has the potential to dominate the 18-35 age bracket (mostly male).  This same age bracket spends a huge amount of time online and can be targeted accurately through online marketing mediums.  I’d like to go over a few of these specific mediums:

Web Design & SEO:  There are still quite a few high profile fighters out there whose websites look like they are from 1993. Fedor’s current official  homepage is fairly outdated, is a hybrid between English and Russian and was last updated in 2007.

Mind you, when someone Googles ‘Fedor’, this official homepage pops on the 1st page of results.   The keyword ‘Fedor’ gets nearly 2 million Google searches per month.   Given Fedor’s popularity within the targeted MMA Marketing age bracket, you’d think that someone would have fixed his site up.   Fedor, if you’re reading this, we’d be glad to help out.

Twitter: Twitter is fast becoming a great way for fighters to keep their fans updated with daily training regimens, upcoming fights, appearances, sponsors etc. Although there are already quite a few MMA fighters that are taking advantage of Twitter, there are many that haven’t yet picked up this good marketing habit.

One notably absent fighter, again, is Fedor.  Someone recently created a fake Fedor Twitter account and tweeted before his Nov. 7th fight that he may have the flu (which must have caused quite a few gamblers to freak out).  Which goes to show:  a fighter with Fedor’s clout should be in control of his own marketing destiny with an official twitter account.  As far as translating his tweets between Russian to English and keeping them up to date – Fedor, once again we’d be glad to be of service.

Forums: MMA forums on sites like Sherdog.com are amazingly active with fans and fighters alike. Forum users will post anything from their opinions on the latest MMA events to their opinions on health care reform. This is a great place for MMA marketers to reach out to potential customers, whether they are promoting a fighter’s newly designed homepage, an upcoming local MMA event, a fight gear site, or anything else related.

Promoters must beware that  simply blasting out spammy posts about your site will certainly cause you to be banned from these forums.   Your posts need to fit in with the topic of conversation and do so in a subtle way.

In conclusion:

I’d like to leave everyone with Fedor’s recent work of art:

Insight Forge has an MMA marketing and SEO skill set. If any fighters, brands or event promoters are in need of services, feel free to contact us for a free site review and campaign estimate.

Recently one of our clients showed off their product at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup.  Presenting in front of a packed crowd at the DLA Piper Central offices, Joel Passen and Steve Hazelton pitched Newton Software’s cutting edge applicant tracking system.  Check out the video below and keep an eye out for Newton’s new recruiting analytics module.  The competition should watch their backs.

You’d think I’m referring to the famous 1968 Ford Mustang that Steve McQueen drove during the chase scene in Bullitt.  However, i’m speaking of a different type of ‘vehicle’ that showed off McQueen’s driving skills.

The Bullitt Chase scene gained a recent resurgence after the live video platform Seero.com tracked the entire chase with real-time GPS synced to video from the film.  It was recently released that Seero is up for sale to the highest bidder on Ebay.

Seero was one of the first live video broadcasting platforms available, debuting not long after Justin.TV in 2007.    Seero distinguishes itself by offering novel GPS sync functionality, allowing broadcasters to track their position along with any live video feed.  Although it doesn’t have the most traffic out of the current live broadcasting platforms, it certainly has a great look and feel.  I can see a number of companies in the Travel, Auto, or GPS sectors benefiting from  Seero’s technology and UI.

Insight Forge has expertise in Search Engine Optimization for Resorts and the vacation industry in general.   While many of the basics of SEO apply to driving organic traffic towards resort websites, there also are several specific details to hone in on.

I’d like to take a minute to highlight some of these tips for Resort Marketing.

1.  Location is Key Your target keywords should definitely be relevant to your resort’s location.  Potential visitors will be typing things like ‘New Hampshire Resort‘ into Google.  You can even afford to get more specific with the keywords, such as honing in on a specific town in New Hampshire.  Even if the traffic is trimmer as you get more targeted, it also will be more relevant to a person’s search and is likely to convert into a booking.

2. A Hosted Blog is Integral In a travel industry full of big players, differentiating your resort with a hosted blog is a very big deal to getting ranked.  This is where you will have the opportunity to expound on the various amenities, seasonal deals, mini-vacation specials, activities and other great things that make your resort unique.  This super targeted content will contribute to making Google see why your resort is relevant for those location specific keywords.  We recommend at least two posts a week using a hosted Wordpress solution (www.myresort.com/blog).

3.  Targeted Social Media Instead of trying to reach as many people as possible with your social media efforts, try and target them towards your resort’s location and specialties.  If you are a ski resort, hop on the #ski Twitter hash, and blast out some of your blog posts mixed with other intresting ski-related articles.  Visit some location relevant forums and begin to create a repetoir with users, before letting them know why your resort rocks.

We have some other tricks up our sleeve… If you own or market for a resort feel free to contact us and we’d be glad to give your resort site a review, free of charge.

You know that dream, where a random person that you haven’t heard from or interacted with in any way for years suddenly pops out of nowhere?  Well I had one of those last night.   Said random person, Lyle, was eating dinner with me at a San Francisco Sushi  restaurant.   It seemed like Lyle and I were best buds in the dream, but in reality I barely even knew him years ago.

I chalked it up to another strange dream, until I was on Facebook the other day and BAM, there’s Lyle right smack dab on my homepage as a ‘recommended’ friend.

First of all, I’m not sure how Facebook figured out to recommend Lyle.  He isn’t friends with any of my other friends.  He doesn’t live in the same city as me.  We didn’t go to the same schools or participate in any of the same groups or activities.  I’ve heard that Facebook may pull from an ‘email’ list if you’ve allowed them access, but my only email correspondence with Lyle was via a now defunct account.   So why did Facebook suggest Lyle to me?

The most likely scenario is that Facebook  is  attempting to control my dreams.  Lyle’s mug must have been sitting on my homepage for a few days and managed to creep into my subconscious.  If not for Facebook’s recommendations, I could have avoided an awkward Sushi dinner with some random guy.  Who knows, I might have dreamt about surfing in Hawaii or living on Mars.   Lyle invaded my dream and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Another new Facebook feature, ‘Reconnect,’ attempts to get you to write on a friend’s wall that you haven’t corresponded with in a while.  Another clear attempt to push random people into our dreams.

Don’t worry though, I can smell Facebook’s dream control plot from a mile away.  Slowly, but surely, you’ll start seeing more random faces in these recommended friend slots.   These random, uninvited individuals will continue to invade your dreams: playing with your dream pets and barbecuing your dream spareribs.  Then, one day you’ll recognize one of these faces in a TV commercial,  a viral video or a magazine ad.    You won’t know this person but you’ll like them for some strange reason.  And you’ll buy their brand name bleach products and anti-depression medications.

Call me paranoid, but I’d bet the farm that Facebook’s various friend finding functionalities are modifying the contents of dreams around the world.  Why don’t you think back to that last random person that popped into your dreams.  Then go and log into Facebook and see if they’re staring right back at you.

Over the past several years, cell phones have advanced from mere portable calling devices to all-in-one mini computers.  The iPhone’s launch marked a transition from our past of using mobile phones primarily for voice, to utilizing them as full-fledged internet surfin’, app. toutin’ devices.

Today, hype is starting to build around the new Android / Verizon lovechild named ‘Droid’.  Droid is being advertised with the following slogan:  “Don’t you wish you had a Robot Sidekick that moved at light speed, could get you out of any problem, and lived in your pocket?”

Clearly Verizon is marketing to the mass of Star Wars fans that have always dreamed of having their own R2-D2 buddy.  (In fact, Verizon is even utilizing Lucas Film’s trademark on the word ‘Droid’.)  Despite the nifty Star Wars tie in, we all know that the Droid’s abilities won’t be able to live up to R2-D2’s intuitive interpersonal skills, such as shocking Ewoks and warning Luke of incoming Tie Fighters.

It’s going to be a while before mobile device A.I. catches up to George Lucas’ imagination.   However, there are several future phone features that we will see in the next few years that should bring us that much closer to having our own ‘Robot Sidekick’.

Augmented Reality 2.0: We already have apps like Layar and Yelp’s iPhone App. which lets you pull up anything from Wikipedia articles to restaurant reviews by pointing your phone in the direction of the object of interest. This stuff’s only gonna get better.  I suspect lightweight glasses with virtual information displays will become as big as iPod earbuds.   Think Terminator’s Termo-Vision, only with less data on killing people.

Also, social augmented reality that ties in Social Networking data and visual recognition software seems a logical next step.  Imagine pointing your phone at that gal in the bar only to find out she’s a friend of a friend and also can’t wait for the 2013 release of Episode 7.  Kinda creepy though.

Language Translation: Imagine traveling around the world and speaking every language you encounter.   With the progression of current language translation and voice recognition software, this doesn’t seem very far off as a mobile application.  Any incoming speech will be instantly translated to your default native tongue and relayed to you through an ear bud.

The output is harder, and might be a bit culturally sensitive.   Speak into your mouthpiece and have the phone output the audio translation in a designated language.   Many cultures could see a ‘robot’ speaking to them as somewhat offensive, however, it could also be a great way to get out of a jam.  The real question: will the app. be able to translate Wookie and Elvish?

Holograms / Projector Displays

When will we get to re-enact the ‘Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope,’ scene with a holographic text to friends?   LG expects to have a projector installed on some phones by 2010.  While it’s not quite a hologram, this could be a great way to take us away from squinting at tiny screens all the time.

A Zen ‘Koan’ is a short story or sentence that seems paradoxical in nature, but can also prove to enlighten a person.  One Koan states: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

SEO Writing  is also a bit of a paradox, due to the fact that all good online articles will inadvertently have an SEO effect, and those written purely for the ‘purpose of SEO’ will most likely fail to accomplish their goal.  In other words:  if you begin with the mindset of writing purely for the search engines, you’ve failed already.  The key to SEO writing is to forget SEO.  Kinda Zen huh?  Let me explain…

The Art of ‘No Mind‘.   Zen Masters used to profess a state of mind called ‘No Mind’.   This mindset was attained when a specific art, say archery, was perfected to such a degree that the master did not need to devote a single thought to hitting a bulls eye.  In modern athletics, this is often referred to as ‘Muscle Memory’.

I’m not saying an SEO writer needs to punch a board ten thousand times to get their article picked up, but rather an SEO writer should stop thinking about SEO.   An SEO writer should think like a REAL writer:  What sort of relevant topics are novel and interesting for my audience?  What writing style should I utilize?  What are the reoccurring themes within my article?  Do I have a beginning, middle and end?   Concentrate on writing first; forget about the keywords.

Keywords are Only as Good as What Surrounds Them.  Now that you’ve gotten all this keyword nonsense out of your head, lets talk about keywords.   Are your target keywords working for you or are you working for them?

IF you are writing SEO articles and stopping to think about throwing in your keywords, you’re working for them.   This is how SEO articles are born with titles like:  ‘5 Ways to Purchase Discount Leather Boots, Leather Gloves and Leather Belts.’   And I’ve definitely written articles just like that.  Nobody reads them, I know.

Write about something you would read.  Even if you are limited by your target keywords, like ‘Leather Boots,’ try to find an angle with some interest.  What are the recent trends with Leather Boots:  did Lindsay Lohan just puke on a pair?  Who wore the first leather boots in history?  How fast can a chimp run 200 meters wearing leather boots?  Seriously, that last one may seem a bit crazy, but wouldn’t’ you read it?

The List is a Powerful Tool…If Used Correctly. I’m sure you’ve heard the hooplah about how lists are great for SEO writing.   There is a grain of truth to this, however, just because you are using bullet points instead of paragraphs doesn’t mean your list will be a sure thing.

Good List:   Top 10 Most Ridiculous Craiglist Posts of All Time

Bad List:   Top 10 Promotional Pens and Pencils by Category – Promotional Gifts with a Difference

While the first list may not be for SEO purposes, it should be used as an example of something people might actually be interested in reading.  The second article clearly was not meant to be read by a person.

Target Keywords… Finally

So you ask, where’s all the ‘basics’ about inserting target keywords into your article?  What is the proper density of keywords to content?  How about anchor tags? And what about story titles?

I’ll answer these questions with another famous Zen Koan:

“When you can do nothing, what can you do?”