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Search Engines

Long tail versus short tail

  • January 11, 2020

To sound like an SEO expert, just ask about “long tail keywords.” What exactly does that mean?

“Long tail” merely refers to the length of the phrase. The term “keyword” gets thrown around a lot. A more apt description for the concept would be “key phrase.” SEO optimization targets specific key phrases that are relevant to your organization, have sufficiently high search volumes, and that you have a chance at ranking on Page 1 for.

When Long Tail is Preferred

That last requirement is where long tail keywords can come in handy. Let’s say you run a small handmade candy shop. Sure, you’d love it if you were #1 on Google for anyone searching candy. The odds of that happening are basically nil. And that’s not a bad thing either. Someone searching on Google for “candy” could be looking for stock photos of candy, a Wikipedia article, or a recipe. There’s nothing indicating intent of their search suggesting that you want them to land on your site and buy candy. So since you won’t, can’t, and don’t want to rank #1 for candy, we start to investigate long tail variations. Use your imagination or a tool like Google Ads Keyword Planner (or both).

  • candy store near me
  • old fashioned candy
  • peanut butter kisses candy
  • handmade cotton candy

An Engaged Audience is a Valuable Audience

As you narrow your focus, you can capture much more traffic. That traffic is much more engaged, or more likely to convert and make a purchase on your site. The downside is, the more focused your keyword is, the lower the search volume will be. Congrats on ranking #1 for a term with 0 average searches per month. The ease of ranking is inversely proportional to the value of the keyword. More valuable keywords are more competitive.

That’s the heart of what SEO practitioners refer to as a “keyword strategy.” Knowing what you want to rank for can sometimes be as hard as actually ranking for it. With a little research, creativity, and maybe a bit of help, you can get a rock solid plan with real return on investment.

Search Engines

Request indexation through Google Search Console

  • December 23, 2019

Every now and then, you will find a page on your website that doesn’t seem to be getting any organic traffic. If you refer to our blog on The Most Basic SEO Test, you may discover it’s because Google isn’t serving it up as a result, no matter how specific you are with your queries (even using site: syntax). If Google hasn’t discovered your content, how can you get organic traffic? The answer is to submit a crawl request through Google Search Console.

The first step is to inspect the URL using the dialog that is now present at the top of every page in GSC. Pop in the URL in question and see what the results say.

Google Search Console Inspect any URL
Google Search Console: Inspect any URL on the domain

The image above shows one possible result. “URL is not on Google. This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed. Learn more”

Google either hasn’t had time to discover the content, or there aren’t any internal links that it could follow. Link to it from other pages and the sitemap.xml to rectify. Either way, Google will probably discover it eventually, but we’d rather control that indexation.

There is a button at the lower right corner of the dialog that says “REQUEST INDEXING.” Hit that button and your content should be discovered, crawled, and available from Google searches within just a few minutes. As with everything, you cannot tell Google what to do, so this is merely an invitation. Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work immediately. It will eventually result in your content being discovered and traffic flowing in to your new content.

Best Practices

9 reasons you should be using a password manager

  • December 7, 2019

Password managers like LastPass or 1Password can help you keep your online life organized, updated, and most of all secure. Here are 9 reasons to start using a password manager today.

  1. Keep all of your website logins in one convenient list. When you store all of your passwords in a single location, you also get a list of all the websites where you have an account. Need to update your address? With a categorized list of all sites, you can quickly run through and ensure you’ve updated your info everywhere.
  2. Have a unique password for every website. We all know we shouldn’t reuse passwords. A lot of us aspire to maintain a set of low, medium, and high security passwords. But when you start to catalog every site from personal and work life, that list easily reaches several hundred. Even if you could think up a unique password for each, good luck remembering that many.
  3. Auto-generated passwords take the stress out of new registrations. No longer do you have to agonize, or even think really, about what your next password should be. Just generate it. It’ll be way more secure than anything you came up with, and you don’t ever need to remember it.
  4. No more forgotten passwords. Even if you haven’t logged into some obscure site for a few years, you’ll never hit “Forgot password” ever again. Avoid any embarrassment contacting IT for the fourth time this week because you don’t remember some login at work.
  5. Sync everything between desktop and mobile. Even on the go, you have all the data at your fingertips. These password managers also work with most apps. No more typing in passwords on a mobile keyboard.
  6. Auto-save passwords. When you do create a new account, you either generate or come up with your own new password. The integrated browser plugin or mobile app will automatically prompt you to save your new password.
  7. Share passwords. If you have a shared bank account or Netflix login, no longer sacrifice security for convenience. Shared passwords can be just as long and complex as any other. Because password managers allow for shared data, everyone stays up to date and synchronized.
  8. Run security audits on your passwords. You can get a security score letting you know of any old, weak, reused, or compromised passwords. You can even run the usernames/emails through a known list of hacked accounts. That alerts if your accounts could have been included in any of the latest public hacking scandals.
  9. Store more than just website passwords. Your friends WiFi network. Your personal credit card number. The gym locker combination. When you get in the habit of storing passwords, you can also start to store secure notes for yourself. That can be a life saver in the real world.
Google Ads

Your PPC bid is not what you pay

  • November 17, 2019

A common misconception of new pay-per-click (or PPC) advertisers is that high bids instantly zap the budget. Running out of budget early causes ads to go dark. But remember – what you bid is not what you pay.

Think about PPC advertising like any other auction. Whether it is a painting or a Pontiac, you enter into an auction knowing which items you want to bid on and how much you are willing to pay. In PPC, keywords are the items bid on. The highest you are willing to pay is known as the max bid. Just because you are willing to pay that much doesn’t mean you will. When the bidding starts, anyone vying for their ad to show go back and forth until the winner emerges. The high bid is $0.01 higher than the previous bid. This all happens in nanoseconds every time the Google search results page loads.

One other difference between PPC and real-life auctions is quality scores. If the content, ad copy, keywords, and landing page relate to a single topic, a higher quality score applies. That score multiplies your bid. With a high quality score, the winner outbids the competition without ever approaching the max bid.

The only way accurate, real-life data on competition and expense emerges is by running campaigns in a learning mode. Evaluate the costs-per-click experienced, percentage of impressions won, and decide whether the budget suffices. If not, the information is still valuable, because it informs your next step looking for new, lower cost/lower competition keywords to bid on.

Best Practices

How to respond to negative reviews

  • October 30, 2019

Whether your online business or organization is listed on Yelp, Google My Business, or any one of countless vertical search engines, it’s almost inevitable these days that you’ll eventually receive a negative review. Or maybe it’s not exactly negative, but it’s less than 5 stars with no supporting comments or explanation. What should you do?

First, you should respond. It’s not fair that they should get the last word and sour your reputation for anyone who may find you later. You can decide for yourself what the best tone of voice is, but a few simple rules are:

  1. Be courteous. You don’t want to come off as defensive, or combative – two things that could do more harm than good.
  2. Be honest. Don’t deny the facts even if the exact details of the exchange weren’t perfect.
  3. Recount the details. Line out what happened, or sometimes more importantly, what didn’t happen.
  4. Accept responsibility. The buck stops with you. Be accountable or if the situation warrants it, apologetic.
  5. Offer a resolution or ask for another chance. Tell them you’d love another chance to earn that fifth star and look forward to seeing them again soon.

By monitoring and replying to negative ads, you maintain control over your online reputation and show that you’re an attentive, responsive, and caring individual. That’s the kind of person people like to do business with!

Search Engines

What’s in a name?

  • October 12, 2019

When thinking of a new name (for a company, an event, or a product) the sooner you consider SEO, the better. One method for evaluating SEO is to get techy. Perform keyword research. Discover seasonality of search trends. Map out audience analysis. Or you can keep it simple and just Google it!

Situations to look for

  • A company 3 blocks over already took the perfect name you just thought up
  • A major international behemoth copyrighted the latest idea for a new product name
  • Common, every-day, high search volume keywords intermixed in the phrase make it impossible to rank

I often think about the precursor to the phenomenon of internet search engine optimization – the Yellow Pages. There it made sense to name yourself “A1 Plumbing,” or “AAA Insurance.” Because everything presented alphabetically, A’s and 1’s optimized your visibility on the page. Nowadays, it’s less about coming first in the alphabet, and more about standing out from the noise.

Where did “Dijon” come from?

When I firsted started trying to pick a company name, everything I thought of and googled was either taken or flooded with competition. The nickname Dijon derives from my first and middle names – David John. Shortened, that became D. John > D’jon > Dijon. When I tried “Dijon Marketing” I found it to be totally unique! Only a few small marketing firms in Dijon, France came up as results. I minted the name and within the first week, ranked #1 on Google. I ran a few ads, optimized local SEO, and dominated the remainder of the search page. Every company dreams of achieving such results!

Next time you brainstorm a name for your organization or a catchy title for a fundraising event, raise your hand and suggest that a browser open to Google be front and center in the conversation.

Search Engines

What is a backlink?

  • September 25, 2019

The most effective means to improve your Google ranking, has always been and still is, generating backlinks to your content. Sounds easy enough. But first, you must understand what a backlink is. Then you can avoid accidentally causing more harm than good.

A backlink is when a site other than yours hyperlinks their users to your site. In order to count as a backlink, it must be on a different domain. Each time someone else links their users to your content, it’s like a vote. A vote for your content being the best on the internet for that topic. The reason you’ve heard the name “Google” is because they were the first to realize this as a ranking factor. They use backlinks to bubble the most popular content to the top – a system called PageRank.

What makes one backlink more valuable than another

But not all votes are equal. A backlink from a very reputable website is worth more than one from an unknown. A single link from whitehouse.gov or apple.com could be worth a hundred or even a thousand regular links. Some backlinks can even have a negative impact if they’re from spammy or malicious websites. In that case, disavow them to tell Google you didn’t ask for nor do you want those backlinks.

There are two important aspects of a backlink – the URL and the anchor text. The anchor text is the actual text you click on to follow the link. Typically that would be blue and underlined. If the anchor text relates to the URL, title, metadata, and content, it’s like a boost to the vote.

How to generate more backlinks

It sounds easy enough to generate a few backlinks to your content. You can ask your friends with websites. You can leave a few comments on some open forums. Or even easier, you can hire one of those link building services online. What’s so hard about that? The problem is that every ranking system is eventually reverse engineered and gamed. So Google has ways of detecting malicious attempts to disingenuously improve your rank. Not only can it be ineffective, it can actually result in penalties being levied against your domain. Most SEO services promising quick rank increases or miracle jumps to page 1 are using networks of spammy websites. They only care about creating a temporary short term bump. This will have a negative impact long term.

That’s not to say that you can’t reach out to relevant and related webmasters and request a backlink. But, the best way to generate backlinks is always to write great, engaging content that people want to read. Then they will want to share. It can take longer, but the benefits of playing by the rules are bigger, better, and longer lasting.

Social Media

Build a basic audience for Facebook Ads

  • September 6, 2019

One of the most powerful aspects of advertising on Facebook is the ability to tailor your audience. Now you can take it to the nth degree. That’s the reason Facebook is free. Users trade their personal data for an engaging social platform. Advertisers purchase that data to find audiences who resonate with their message (read: buy).

In non-profit and charity fundraising, dedicate your precious advertising dollars for donors and volunteers sympathetic to your cause. The focus needn’t be myopic. However, audience consciousness makes a difference in the effectiveness of an ad.

Building a basic audience is easy. There are a few things to consider:

  • Location
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Language
  • Connections – whether they like or follow your page
  • Detailed targeting – this is where it gets fun!

Detailed targeting allows you to find pet lovers, runners, or social warriors. Users either gave this information willingly or performed telling behaviors on the platform. Some audience examples might be:

  • Women aged 55+ in Dallas, TX who speak English and list knitting as a hobby
  • Anyone 18-40 within 20 miles of Dallas, Houston, or San Antonio concerned with LGBTQ equality
  • Spanish speakers in Texas who like BBQ

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, who you’re trying to reach is a huge part of success!

Graphic Design

Hex color codes explained

  • August 17, 2019

Even if you’re relatively hands-off with your website or graphic design, chances are you’ve encountered hex color codes before. They can seem like garbled computer code, but there is a method to the madness. I’ll try today to demystify these codes and give you one more digital tool in your toolbelt.

First, if your eyes are already glazing over, don’t worry. There are many color pickers online that will do this for you. My favorite to use is by Google and is available right within Google search results. Just search for “color picker” and there it is.

Google search results color picker
Google Search results color picker

Just pick a color and this will reveal the hex code to you. “Hex” is short for “hexadecimal” and is a base 16 representation of numbers 0 through 16. In hex, when you count to 9 instead of resetting to 0, it increments to A (10), B (11), C (12), D (13), E (14), and F (16). A two-digit hex number can thus range from 00 to FF.

You’ll see in the screen capture that a hex color code, though, has 6 digits. This is because it is comprised of 3 different 2-digital hexadecimal numbers. Each value represents how much of each primary color for a pixel is present. Unlike when mixing paint the three primary colors when mixing light are red, GREEN, and blue.

The rich green color shown in the example has a red value of 32. You don’t necessarily have to calculate its base 10 equivalent. Just recognize that 32 is relatively low on the scale. So this color doesn’t have much red. The green value is A8. Not surprising that there would be a lot of green here. And last the blue value is sort of middle-to-low at 52. If you’d like to know their exact values, look no further than the RGB code displayed just below. RGB, if you haven’t guessed, stand for Red, Green, Blue, and gives a base 10 decimal number for each value instead of hexadecimal between 0 and 255. Our guesses of low red, high green, and middle blue are confirmed by the code RGB(50, 168, 82).

If every value is zero (#000000) then the color is black. If every value is as high as it can go (#FFFFFF) then the color is white. So if every value is low, it will be a dark color. If every value is high, it will be a light color. The relative balance between them dictates which color is dominant within the hue and value. Color mixing is similar (but a bit different) to what you learned in preschool. Red and green make yellow. Green and blue make cyan. Blue and red make magenta.

Give the color picker a try and see if you can start to recognize generally what each code represents. Then you can impress your friends and coworkers when you say, “I think we should use #C41440 instead of pure red.”

Search Engines

Optimize every image for SEO

  • August 1, 2019

Optimize every image, every time. Make this a rule for your website. You’d be surprised how much image optimization can influence SEO – not only for regular search engine queries, but especially for image-only searches. To date, Google has not formally released any image or optical character recognition (OCR). That means there are only a few ways it can query images.

  1. File name
  2. Alt text
  3. Page content

Optimizing images for SEOTake this picture, for example. I’ve left the file name unedited for better attribution to the artist on Pexels.com. But if you were using it on your website, you could consider the context, placement, and keywords you are attempting to rank for. It might make sense to rename it with one of these methodologies:

  • Literally what is in the image: stethoscope-pen-appointment-book.jpg
  • What it might be used for: making-medical-appointments.jpg
  • What keywords you are targeting: doctors-without-borders.jpg

Use dashes in place of spaces. If you make it a habit every time to stay disciplined and choose a descriptive file name for every image, your site will be higher quality overall.

Alt text can be a bit more free form, but follows the same methodologies. You set it in the image tag like <img src=”stethoscope-pen-appointment-book.jpg” alt=”Stethoscope and pen on top of an appointment book”> Alt text is good for both SEO and site readers for the visually impaired. In our example, additional alt text examples might be “Making medical appointments,” or “Doctors Without Borders taking appointments.”

The rest is based on the content of the page. Keep images relevant, and supporting the central theme of your page. That will help your images rank giving you another stream of organic traffic to discover your message – both image searches and knowledge tiles!