This is a mantra that Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa swears by. In a recent interview with Revenews, Anne explains her testing tactics, common mistakes and why lies ahead for landing pages in the future.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

• What is most overlooked in landing page testing?

Aside from the fact that it’s not done?!

Obvious stuff like match your headline to the headline of the ad or offer that drove the traffic, make your buttons bigger, get rid of extraneous navigation, etc.

I also think mainstream marketers have overlooked the possibility of overlays; they look like a pop-up but are not blocked by pop-up blockers. It’s a great way to garner email opt-ins, among other things. Make them look classy and they can work for your brand. And probably not enough people have tested added video, let alone all the related permutations like sound off, sound on, auto-play, etc.

• What are the three or four best practices that you can recommend to people?

Use bigger, more prominent buttons.

Test your headline copy and your button copy. Test stripping off the navigation bar, extra columns, and all extraneous content from your key conversion pages.

It’s pretty simple really. And when your IT team tells you the site’s “already been tested”, you have to educate them that usability testing has NOTHING to do with A/B testing. Usability testing is great, but it doesn’t tell you how to stop people from abandoning your site, your registration forms or your cart. Usability testing doesn’t help you learn how to convince people to convert.

• Let’s talk about cutting edge practices. What are the future of landing pages?

What surprises me the most when I talk to marketers about landing page testing is they seem to think theirs is a one size fits winner for landing pages. As we well know, not all traffic is equal and behaves differently. Should we be segmenting our landing page testing? If so, how should we be thinking about it? And is there technology out there to help us?

Marketers who want to use a single landing page for everything are a perennial problem as are marketers who want to use their homepage as their PPC landing page or who send traffic for a specific keyword to a general “category” page. I think these marketers know better, but are hamstrung by budgets and politics.

The CMOs of this world have some work to do on this front. They need to cut down the jungle of problems around getting new landing pages created. They need to enable their teams to build and launch landing pages on the fly… and to test them! This is a problem of internal company politics, nothing more. Cheap and easy technology has been here for more than a decade.

So, now that you know how to create an effective landing page, I have a question… how many of you actually use landing pages when promoting your business.

Building a “Future-Proof” SEO strategy shouldn’t be too hard if you understand what search engines have in mind. Essentially the engines are trying to match people up with the best possible search result for the query, so you should build your site accordingly. You should strive to have the most authoritative pages for your keyword searches, and offer tools and resources that people can’t find on most other sites in your field. You should also stay on the “continuous improvement” path with your site design and link building since this is congruent with current SEO practices while it builds a better site for the client. A search engine gets and keeps its authority among users by giving the most accurate results, so you should not only strive for accuracy but stickiness. If Google or Bing can see that the top link for the query didn’t result in a lot of clicks back to the engine, then it is more apparent that the user found the right information. In turn, the user is going to visit the same engine in the future.

Understanding previous updates and filters can also help you anticipate what is going to happen down the road. For instance, Google recently added page speed into its list of ranking factors. Many other changes are relative to semantics, or the relationship between words on a page. Site owners with original, well written content would be the beneficiaries of better semantic indexing in the future, while people who use machine generated (or “spun”) content may find their pages in worse positions. For example, the Google Mayday update had a large impact (mainly reported as negative) on many long-tail phrases, and this was relevant to content and the trust (via linking and other signals) on pages containing that content. Anyone who is working in “Gray Hat” territory should consider the potential for future updates which are certain to be better at detecting tricks that work right now.

The influence of social media on SEO is also something that should not be discounted. Tweets, Facebook references, and other traffic relevant to a site can go a long way toward establishing an understanding of sites that are popular among users. They can also help search engines sort out which sites are “static” and which ones are playing an active role in the online community. While there isn’t too much direct social media influence on optimization right now, it does make sense to integrate your profiles with your website in order to help associate your company’s presence with a single destination.

If you’re an ecommerce site selling products, it also pays to stay ahead of the next search engine update. Search spiders and robots are always getting better at reading pages they previously could not discover. If you have a large product catalog, this means that your rivals who previously had a less SEO-friendly site are now getting crawled and indexed.  Your position in the search market can get diluted by improvements in the search engine algorithms unless you plan ahead. For starters, you should make your product descriptions as unique as possible, instead of just importing in content from the manufacturer, which will appear on hundreds of other sites. Second, you should make sure your shopping cart structure has a better hierarchy, logical breadcrumbs, and good internal linking. Naturally you should have better product page titles as well. If you play your cards right, you can improve rankings across the board for your products even when the marketplace suddenly becomes more crowded.

While it isn’t possible to predict every search engine algorithm change, it pays to have a vision for search engine changes. If you expect search engines to get better at finding content, and assigning a relative value to what they find, then you can build that vision into your website strategy. In short, it pays to be the best. Not only are people more likely to link to the best website, they are also more likely to visit that site again. If you can present good information to the new searcher, and bring that person back via bookmarks and direct traffic, your benefit is obvious, while a search engine may use such information (gathered through toolbars and server logs) to understand which sites people “like” more than others. If you can readily show why someone would want to visit your site more than once, then you probably have less to fear from an SEO change than a site that does not provide the same value to visitors. As long as you can “endorse” the ranking choice made by the search engine, then you will not only be able to succeed in SEO, but you will also have a site everyone wants to see.

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Using The Footer

The footer of your website is the last portion of the page, literally all the way at the bottom. Footers can be used to improve optimization by including your business’s address and phone number. This information will then be used by search engines to reaffirm your location relevance.

Optimizing Headers & Logos

Optimizing the headers & logos used across many pages can play a large factor in helping achieve a high ranking for your homepage keyword. Two elements of an image can be optimized. The file name and alternative text. The image file name and alternative text should include your homepage keyword and the name of your business.

Importance of Unique Title & Description Tags

During the eighth post we discussed how to optimize individual pages and one aspect was to include the keyword a page is being optimized for in the title tag and description tag. When taking a look at the website as a whole its best to use what is called the halo effect to achieve site-wide optimization. Here is an excellent graph describing the concept.

Using the website map created in post six review the list of pages on your website and write title tags and description tags that support your homepage keyword while remaining unique to the specific page.

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Just like any other profession, there are good SEO’s, bad SEO’s, and a lot of other SEO’s in between. Now far be it for me to use this as a place to toot my own horn, but I feel like a pretty good SEO – definitely not an industry leader at this point, but still very far from bad.

To be a good SEO, you MUST have a diversity of skills. It’s not like some other professions where you can just be really good at one thing, you’ll usually have to be a “Jack of All Trades” so to speak.

So if Search Engine Optimization is a career option that you’re considering, let me describe some of the skills that a good SEO should possess:

#1. Problem Solving Ability

With SEO, you’ll find that you’ll do a good amount of problem solving. Whether it be finding potential issues with a client site so that you can fix them, or competitive research to figure out how a client’s site stack up, you’ll have to be able to find some sort of answer to many complex issues that come up during the course of an SEO campaign.

A good SEO should not just be able to identify problems, but find efficient paths to solving those issues as they arise.

#2. Data & Analysis

As an SEO, one thing that you’ll constantly have to look at is some form of data. This could be traffic data, ranking reports, inbound link data, indexed pages, etc. So if you’re not a numbers person, maybe it’s time to start thinking numbers.

As a kid and now as an adult, I am big into sports. And because of sports, I’m way into reviewing data and statistics. Whether it be my favorite player’s batting average or how many touchdowns my team’s running back scored last season, stats are something I’ve been analyzing my whole life.

#3. Connecting Dots & Making Assumptions

Having a stat-driven background is definitely something that has helped me as an SEO, but you have to remember to look at statistics with an analytical mind, which means you have to look at the numbers and make logical assumptions based on those numbers.

You’ll have to look at trends within your traffic reports and be able to answer the how’s and why’s. You’ll have to look at ranking reports and be able to find the correlations to your efforts. You’ll find that a lot of SEO is about connecting the dots and making assumptions based on the numbers that are in front of you.

Think of yourself as Vegas odds-maker. You may not make the right bet with your SEO strategy every time, but over the long-haul you should be able to look at the trends to make accurate decisions about your SEO campaign going forward that should eventually bear fruit.

#4. Research, Research, Research

It almost seems like SEO campaigns that I work on are 80% research and 20% action. You’ll have to be able to perform keyword research, analytics research, etc, and (like I said in the above point) be able to make assumptions as far as which direction you’ll need to go with your strategy.

This is probably one of the most important skills you must possess, as bad research at the beginning of the campaign can lead you down the path of no results and can cost your clients a lot of time and money. And believe me, you don’t want clients on your butt all the time, so you better learn to make smart decisions up front and get the most out of your research skills.

#5. Coding & Design Principles

Surprisingly, coding and design is not a skill for many SEO’s – but it SHOULD be. As an SEO, you’ll need to be able to quickly scan through back-end and front-end code to identify issues (and not just meta tags). Sometimes there’s tricky stuff going on with code that will make search engines want to kill your site, and you’ll be responsible for knowing how to resolve those issues.

Even though I said that many SEO’s don’t possess a knowledge of coding, there are still a fair amount of those who have a coding and design background (including myself). I actually started as a web designer, and the transition from web designer to SEO has been a very natural one once since I started to wonder why the hell my sites weren’t ranking.

In addition to code, it’s also good to have an understanding of design principles and graphic design. If you’ve been in the industry at all, you’ll know that a lot of times a pretty site might sacrifice SEO, while an ugly site may have great SEO. I will be your knowledge of good design principles that will keep you team’s designers from committing mortal SEO sins to produce a pretty site with pretty SEO.

So if you’re a web designer already, it may be an easy transition into an SEO career if you have enough of a desire to learn the stuff that goes with it.

#6. Marketing & Tech Savvy

In order to maximize your the results of your SEO campaigns, you’ll have to have a pretty heavy understanding of marketing techniques both online and offline. Trust me, this will be helpful in plenty of other areas as well (up to and including personal branding, if you run a blog like mine)…

In addition, you’ll need to know what is going on in the tech space so you can ensure that you’re on top of all the latest goings on to ensure that you’re getting the most out of every opportunity on behalf of your clients.

#7. Client Facing & Putting Out Fires!

Gone are the dark rooms devoid of light where developers and designers prefer to lurk. Just pretend you’re a customer service representative with SEO skills, because you’ll need to be in front of clients a lot.

Prepare to do a lot of talking, a lot of explaining, and a lot of expectation setting (as I’ll detail below).

#8. Results Oriented & Expectation Setting

The bottom line in any SEO campaign is profit. What kind of profit can you generate for your client’s investment? There is a lot of grey area in SEO, and a lot of SEO folks out there who do little more than take a clients money while providing nothing in return.

Don’t be one of those SEO’s. Clients will appreciate you a lot more if you’re results-oriented and willing to show them the results (good or bad) in a manner in which they can understand.

In fact, being up front about your strategies, results, etc often leads to being able to set reasonable campaign expectations, which will save you a ton of headaches in the end. Trust me.

#9. Work Smart, Not Hard (But Be Relentless While You’re Doing It

How well a site does SEO-wise is usually a reflection of how much time and effort somebody puts into it – so be relentless as hell and literally outwork other sites into sweet victory.

That being said, nobody wants to work any harder than they have to, so be sure to work smart, not hard. That means being efficient in completing your tasks, making good decisions based upon a foundation of solid research, and be generally smart and logical when approaching your campaign’s unique set of issues.

#10. Industry Awareness

The SEO industry is constantly changing, and you’ll have to be prepared to keep up with all of the latest trends. Your awareness of the current going-ons in the industry can literally be where you will sink and swim. A good way to keep up with trends (and how I first learned SEO) is to keep up with leading SEO industry experts and their blogs, which can provide tremendous insight into what’s really going on in the industry.

Now this probably isn’t everything that you’ll need to be a success within the SEO industry, but it’s a good start.

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Labs

• Fetch as Googlebot
• Malware details
• Sidewiki
• Site performance

Fetch as Googlebot

If you wanted to know what the search engines see when they visits your site you used to have to use the Lynx browser. Now you have a similar option using Webmaster tools. While not providing you access to a text-only browser, Google does give you a spider’s view of any web page of your site.

Simply add the page URL into the box and hit submit. It usually only takes a few seconds to return a result so hit the refresh button and you should see the success link provided in short order. Click that link and you’ll see the spider’s view of your page.

The header information is provided along with all the HTML the search engine indexes when it spiders your page. The drop down to the left of where you enter the URL allows you to select which spider you want to view; Web, Mobile: XHTML/WML and Mobile: cHTML. You can test each of these to make sure your site can be viewed and indexed properly on each of these, as needed.

Malware details

I can’t offer much on this section because the screenshot you see here is the only thing I’ve ever seen on any site’s I’ve dissected in Webmaster tools. I suppose that’s a good thing.

Read more information about Google’s malware details, including a screenshot of what you might see yourself.

Sidewiki

Sidewiki is brand new to Webmaster Tools Labs and allows site owners to take a bit of control over their Sidewiki area without having the Google toolbar installed. The control offered is extremely limited, allowing you to post a comment of your own or have a default comment posted by Google that stays at the top of all Sidewiki comments.

I’m not a big fan of Sidewiki and while this addition to webmaster tools is a nice way to easily provide an opening comment, it doesn’t go near far enough to help business owners stay up to date on Sidewiki comments without having to install the Google toolbar and to checking back frequently.

Site performance

This section of Google Webmaster Tools will become increasingly important with time, as search engines are beginning to factor page download speed into their algorithms. Google provides a nice graph that shows you how your page download speeds have averaged over the past several months.

Based on this information you can tell how your site compares to others, whether you’re slower or faster, and the average load time of several of your key pages.

If you scroll a bit further down the page you’ll be provided with some specific URLs with expandable details on how you can improve each page for faster load time.

Google also provides a link to their Page Speed tool which can give you additional insight and ways to speed up your site’s performance.

That’s Webmaster Tools in a nutshell. Google provides lots of good features here that you can’t get through traditional analytics software. Webmaster Tools is pretty simple and straightforward and provide you valuable insight into your site’s performance and issues that you can address to improve your rankings on Google and the other search engines.

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Pull Quotes

If you’ve read a magazine in the past 20 years, chances are good you’ve seen pull quotes in action. Somewhere in page they will select a quote-worthy bit of text, make it larger than normal and maybe a different color, then wrap the rest of the text around it (like that box above). How can you use pull quotes to your advantage? Maybe you could emphasize a an important bit of text or a fragment that will help you close the deal and make the conversion. Another option is to use it to emphasize your primary keyword without looking spammy. Since it’s set aside visually, it’s easier to use without having awkward language or sentence structure to deal with. It’s super easy to implement too. I use the simple pull quote plugin.

Images

If search engines are text based, how will using images help? Images can help in a few ways. If you use the text adjacent to an image to describe the image, use alt text to describe the image, and name the file properly, you will do better in image searches, which yields more traffic. If you format your images nicely, you can even include your primary keyword another time on the page without looking spammy. This can help with regular search engine traffic. Also, people like pictures of what they are buying or signing up for: it gives them confidence in their decision. Just keep you pictures accurate.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is, in my opinion, one of the most under-utilized parts of SEO. People spend a lot of time creating great content but don’t link to it properly or often enough. As I stated in my How I Create and Manage A Wordpress Website article, I’m all about working smarter not harder, and I use plugins to help me GTD. First, I come up with high level list of keywords, then I use crosslinker to automatically interlink them together. The second tool I use is the insights plugin to do searches on my blog, Google, images, video, news, blogs, maps, Wikipedia and other places right from the post page without having to open a second tab. I can search for the term, highlight the word, and click, and it will create the link for me. It doesn’t get any easier. You should also put links to related posts into your text. It’s an easy way to expose people to more content. Using breadcrumbs are another easy, often-overlooked method of increasing internal links.

Essentials – Title tags, URL Format, Meta Description

These three aspects are key to every post you publish, but they are often overlooked. Your page title is probably your strongest on-page factor, but it’s often not used to its full potential. Have you ever read a post where the author was trying to be entertaining and used a title like “My Wild Saturday and Sunday in Sin City Where I Didn’t Spend a Fortune”? As humans, we know it’s a post about how the author had a good time in Las Vegas without spending a fortune, but search engines aren’t that smart. More significantly, do you think there’s any search volume on that phrase? How about  ”Discount Weekend Vacations to Las Vegas” or “Save Money on Weekend Trips to Las Vegas”. Now, of course, there are plugins that let you change the page title and post title, but that’s not permission for you to lose KWD focus. Your post title is still used for all your internal anchor text, so don’t squander it.

URL format: keep it as short as possible. Shoot for the 3-5 word range and eliminate all stop words. Avoid using date formats in your URL if at all possible.

Meta descriptions: yes, I know they don’t count as part of the ranking algorithm,  but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them. Your meta description is usually what appears under your title in the SERP’s, so don’t waste the opportunity. Also don’t duplicate your meta description. Duplicating the language will work against you.

Keyword Research

Once you’ve got a rough idea what you want to write a post about but before you put a single word down on paper (so to speak), do a little keyword research. There are a lot of tools out there–some are free and some are paid. In my experience, the data you get from the paid tools is a little better but, if you’re on a budget, the free ones like Google Adwords Keyword Tool are perfectly fine. Let’s take my example from above about weekend vacations in Las Vegas:

Now we can see my initial suggestions really didn’t have enough volume; however, they acted as jumping off points to lead me to “Las Vegas Weekend Deals” and “Las Vegas Weekend Packages.” From an editorial standpoint, writing  ”Las Vegas Weekend Deals” is completely different from “Save Money on Weekend Trips to Las Vegas” and “”My Wild Saturday and Sunday in Sin City Where I Didn’t Spend a Fortune.” You can still talk about the fun you had in Vegas without spending a lot of money, but the story and the way you tell it should be dramatically different. You can include a travel affiliate links from Priceline, maybe drop in a ticket broker link for the show you saw, and maybe a link to passport service or travel insurance. If you have some idea where you are trying to end up, you’ll have an easier time getting there.

Scribe SEO

Scribe SEO is the one tool on this list that’s not free. You have to pay a monthly fee to use it. So why am I recommending it here and using an affiliate link to do it? Because it works. Scribe SEO does a lot of the things we should be doing with every post but that we are too distracted to remember to do. Before you publish any post, hit the analyze button, and it gives the post a quick once-over for basic SEO factors. Think of it as your mom who points out that your shirt is sticking out of the back of your pants as you’re on your way out the door to catch the school bus every morning. Simply put, using Scribe SEO has put a couple hundred extra dollars in my pocket every month, and that’s why I recommend it (read the full Scribe SEO Review for more info).

That’s it. Those are my 6 quick tips to help you write better posts, bring you more traffic, and hopefully make you more profitable.

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I learned a number of useful things about securing a WordPress site, so I’ll share them here with you.

Forcing administration over SSL is easily done by editing the wp-config.php file. You can enforce either:

• All logins over SSL
• All logins and admin pages over SSL (the backend pages are all https:)

We installed an inexpensive SSL certificate on the server, one that resolves to his domain name. We needed to enforce the use of SSL on all pages since there is a login box either in the template or in a widget on all pages (it’s a pretty small site). Having a login on an http: page that resolves to an https: page may or may not be secure. Forcing all pages of a site to use SSL can bog it down, but in this case the difference was very minimal. For a larger site with more traffic, I’d probably not have a login box on every page to avoid this; rather we’d link to one secure login page.

A few other plugins we found to be useful:

• Limit Login Attempts – makes brute force attacks fairly impossible by blocking an IP after too many login attempts
• Secure WordPress – performs cleanup work on the site after installation, removing vulnerabilities
• Threat Scan – checks the installation and database for ‘things out of place’

And finally, a few resources that I bookmarked…

Increase Your WordPress Blog’s Security by Running it Through SSL

9 Best WordPress Security Plugins

I hope this helps someone else – I was pleased to find that it’s actually quite easy to put a few reasonably strong security measures in place for any WordPress site.

When I got to look at DIY SEO my first thought was: good structure & layout, lets see what is under the hood. But then after opening up the hood I found a car with no engine.

On a score of usability I would give the site a 9 or a 10, but in terms of utility it would be lucky to score as high as a 2 or a 3.

Google AdWords: The Cheapest SEM Strategy for Small & Local Businesses

Maybe there are some small businesses out there who are content being obscure, or who only want to rank for their own business name plus maybe 1 or 2 longtail keywords. But for those businesses I suggest bypassing SEO and buying a few Google AdWords ads.

• Low traffic keywords are typically cheap to buy search ads on - because you only pay by the click. If few people are searching for something then there will be few clicks to buy.
• Not only are such markets small, but due to their small size they are also heavily fragmented, making the AdWords traffic even cheaper.
• If few people are searching for your brand then you can likely spend $25 a month on AdWords and ignore learning SEO.

A Legitimate SEO Strategy Requires Investment

With a paid search campaign, you can use Google AdWords to instantly buy search traffic and gain new customers. SEO is a drawn out strategy & typically requires a much deeper initial investment.

There is little value in investing in SEO unless your goal is to dominate your market, and there is sufficient market scale to justify investing thousands of Dollars (and far more when you consider the value of your time). After all, a single link from Business.com or the Yahoo! Directory will run you $299, and 2 links hardly makes for an effective SEO strategy - but they will set you back $600 a year.

And you don’t get those links any cheaper just because your business is small.

Why Does DIY SEO Offer Such a Weak SEO Solution?

When looking at DIY SEO it took me a while to think it through, because I kept thinking “something is missing.” Why did they raise funding to build THAT? But then I thought it through. DIY SEO was designed by marketers looking to sell something that would be easy to sell at scale - it was not created out of passion to solve a real problem with the desire to help make a difference in people’s lives.

The difference is not subtle.

After all, Andy is the guy who had time to build out hundreds of thin affiliate sites, while being too lazy (and lacking the concern needed) to fix his SEO blog for months while it installed malware on anyone who visited his site. That blog had the tagline Livin’ the dream, but that is for him though…you can live with malware. He doesn’t care.

Could you imagine a reputable SEO site like Search Engine Land, SEO Book, SEOmoz, or Search Engine Journal delivering malware for months without any care or concern? I can’t.

SEO Consulting is Expensive

SEO is both time consuming and expensive. Neither Andy or Patrick offer consulting services because they value their time too much to actually dig into client websites and provide useful, relevant, honest, and effective feedback. Patrick states this on his blog

And as Andy’s site states: he no longer sells consulting, and he does not want you to email him

DIY SEO was designed as a high margin automated solution which is so automated that it wouldn’t require much feedback or interaction with customers.

But there is one big problem with that strategy…

SEO is *NOT* a Mechanical Process

For anyone looking to seriously compete on the web the DIY SEO tool/system is inadequate, and potentially even harmful. Why?

In SEO, a lot of the potential profit comes from knowing your market well, leveraging new technologies & distribution channels to gain market share, and putting a new spin on old marketing ideas. But they tried to make SEO too black and white…far too mechanical. Anywhere where critical thought & analysis can add value to your SEO strategy, you can count on none of it being done with DIY SEO, just some predetermined path which doesn’t really account for everything that makes your business and your market unique.

In an age where the algorithms keep advancing faster and subjective things like branding start playing a role in the search results, mechanical doesn’t cut it.

DIY SEO is too prescriptive and limited in nature, and it is a backward looking product. What the phrase “for the rest of us” actually means is “good enough to rank on page 5 of the search results, where you will get virtually no search traffic and make no money.”

Paint by Number SEO: An SEO Failure Case Study

Google doesn’t always respond to marketing efforts in a predictable way. Consider what happened when Patrick purchased SearchEngineOptimization.net for over $60,000.

At the end of last year he tried to do a 301 redirect to get it to rank, but when it didn’t work he asked Matt Cutts about it:

Google’s spam czar Matt Cutts never responded (of course), but Patrick ended up having to remove that redirect. Months later that $60,000+ domain name was a “coming soon” page.

And now that the redirect has been removed the original redirected site does not rank as well as it did in the past. So that was certainly a lose / lose scenario.

And the worst part is, when he mentioned the strategy people warned him about what would happen right up front:

He would have been better off donating that money to charity!

Advanced SEO? Or Simpleton SEO?

I don’t want to share too many examples of how/why/where their program falls short, but to pick a rather glaring one…

Links are the backbone of an effective SEO strategy. Patrick Gavin built from scratch the #1 link broker on the web - Text Link Ads. A few years back he sold that company for over $30 million. Since then links have only increased in importance while becoming harder to get, but if you check out the advice on links in DIY SEO (or at least when I recently checked it out), one of the “advanced” SEO tips was to ensure that you are not engaging in any link buying or selling.

The advanced tips were not sharing safe & effective link buying techniques. Nope.

The advice was to ensure you were not engaging in link buying or selling.

And, of course, on their own websites they don’t follow their own advice.

What Do Effective SEO Campaigns Consist of?

I have no desire to out any of their specific websites (hey I have some crappy ones too), but when you look at the EFFECTIVE strategies that you see Andy and Patrick use in their own publishing efforts, at a minimum they contain strategies like:

• buying old websites
• buying strong domain names
• selectively buying links
• providing a bit of grease to certain About.com guides for coverage of new 1 page sites
• nepotistically cross linking sites
• launching top 100 linkbait lists about trending popular topics
• building social media accounts to promote those lists
• buying out some blogs to further seed giving legitimate looking coverage to those lists
• launching egobait lists of topics like the top 100 ambidextrous hermaphrodite bloggers (complete with running an automated email script to alert people of the “award” they have won, with some people winning multiple awards in the same day - congrats again Nancy P. from Texas on your multiple meaningless awards + thanks for the links…your email address is now in the database, and you will win many more awards as they build out their portfolio of websites!!!!)

… all the clever bits of marketing that go into REAL SEO campaigns that compete on the competitive commercial web … well that stuff is NOT part of the DIY SEO program.

And it likely won’t EVER be, because it isn’t paint by number.

Better Small Business SEO Solutions

Want an effective guide to small business SEO? Check out Matt McGee’s small business SEO guide. It will give you more than the above program while only setting you back $25.

There are numerous free guides worth recommending as well. Both Bing and Google offer SEO starter guides. We created this one for non-profits, this one for bloggers, and this one for general business websites. SeoMoz offers a pretty good one too.

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SEO conspiracy theories aside, there are usually reasons why natural rankings improve in tandem with PPC. In many cases, people had started to pay attention to their websites within a few weeks of starting a sponsored match campaign, if only to improve the possibility of a conversion when the paid clicks started coming. At minimum, this increases the freshness of a website, and generally there are better keywords on the PPC landing pages when people start making changes. In many cases, we have customers who are doing SEO and PPC at the same time, so we can deduce that our own work, which once again may have started weeks or months earlier, was starting to bear fruit.

Secondarily, depending on your PPC spend, you might actually be getting natural search engine links after people visit your site through the paid channels. Site visitors may be bookmarking your site, commenting on it in blogs, or asking questions about it in forums. Although this roundabout way of link acquisition is not recommended as an SEO strategy, it does make for a reasonable link between PPC and higher search engine positions, especially if you have “sticky” or “viral” content on your site that needed to be discovered. People who have new tools, features, widgets, or content on their sites may want to consider the use of PPC to “prime the pump” if they believe that that a certain level of traffic may generate critical mass for sustainable word-of-mouth traffic.

Making your site more PPC friendly can certainly improve your chances for getting better search engine rankings. This is especially true since the advent of “quality score” measures in Adwords and Bing Adcenter, which give preference to landing pages that have text content that is relevant to the keyword being purchased. Natural search engine spiders, which read the same content, are going to give more credence to a page if it has a good keyword focus. Additionally, your site may already have met several of the factors that search engine algorithms are looking for, so improved content may be the difference between a lackluster ranking and a competitive position.

Finally, there is some consensus on the idea that natural search engine rankings, paired with visible PPC ads, results in an improved conversion rate. It may seem unusual that someone may want to pay for Adwords on keywords that rank naturally, but many advertisers choose to keep the paid keywords running if they have a high enough conversion rate to be profitable. The visibility of the same site in paid and natural positions creates a greater sense of trust in the mind of the customer, and it also means that you are holding a fair portion of search engine real estate. Experimenting with ads on keyword queries that already rank well may be one way to test an ROI improvement, but (as always) it could be unnecessary if you are happy with the traffic generated by your natural positions.

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If you’re looking to buy a DIY template, or download a website from a template, you have a lot of choices available. Some of these with be SEO friendly because you have total control over the code, and if you are an intermediate HTML designer then you can just go into the site’s source code and drop in the relevant title, meta description, keyword, and content information. (By the way, the general consensus in the search engine crowd is that the keyword tag can be left blank, but we prefer to use it so we can track the page’s focus.)

If you’re building your website on a CMS, you may need to do some digging to find out if the site is SEO friendly. Normally, a DIY site design suite is using a CMS if you can utilize “drag and drop” web design elements. A few platforms which let you create your own website will only allow you to create a “default” title tag that is going to show up the same on all of your interior pages. This does not help your site because the search engine can’t figure out which pages are the most relevant to the topic. Some other CMS systems will stick your domain name into the beginning of the title, and this also reduces your search engine effectiveness.

You don’t have to be a custom website design expert to enjoy the benefits of good search engine optimization, but it helps to understand whether the platform is SEO friendly before you buy it. In some cases, you may not have control over your domain name if you choose to leave a DIY web design and hosting company and go somewhere else, which means that you are starting at square one when it comes to optimization. For website design templates that include shopping carts, it is doubly important to have built-in SEO friendly features that are going to present your products in the best possible way to Google, Bing, and Yahoo, or they aren’t going to be visible among the top results. Over the past couple of years, more and more templates and website builders have added complex SEO features into their standard offerings. If you plan to make a website using one of these tools, then adding SEO functionality to the list of requirements will help you get a head start on search engine rankings.

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