Enterprise SEO

February 17, 2013 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

If your are an in-house SEO department or an agency, SEO from an enterprise level is always going to be challenging The challenges need to be understood before you can overcome them and be as productive as possible. Let’s talk about some of the main ones:

Education of SEO – Executives love the results of SEO but have very little understanding of the investment that is needed to succeed. If you ar an agency, you tend to be more always chasing the “why do we need them, we can do this in-house”. If you are in-house, you have a ton of competition with other media sources like paid search, email, media buying, affiliates, etc. You also have to deal with “to many cooks in the kitchen” where everyone has a piece of the responsibility. From technical and architectural upkeep, content writing and creation, design, social media, press, are great examples. With all of these influences, you can bet disagreements will happen. This is where you need to be an expert in educating all. Honestly, it does not take much to do this but it is time consuming. Quick presentations, links to specific articles that you put company specifics to, and showcasing competitive SEO strategy (and results) will do this.
Lack of solid teamword – We all know everyone is busy and they are not just sitting around waiting for SEO to come up with tasks that need to be completed. We also have different KPIs to hit. Each one has explicit metrics and goals that they must hit annually so as to be presumed successful in their position. These goals and metrics don’t always align cross-departmentally, which can lead to things not being done that would help what everybody’s final goal should be – increase income or business price for the company. An instance of this is when the SEO team knows that there are basic issues with the site that are prohibiting it from ranking as well as it might , for example non-original content. Because they rely without delay on the Information Technology department to carry out code changes like redirects, canonical tags, country-specific XML sitemaps, etc.

Solving These SEO Challenges

Communication plain and simple – What makes SEO so challenging is that your results (and worth) is based on others. You need overall buy-in for all factors within a company. An occasional email won’t cut it. You need to be able to have open discussions with all facets of an organization including with higher and upper management, with promoting departments, I. T. departments, content writers, branding groups. The list could go on. The point is you must create an environment where SEO is a company-wide adoption where everybody understands its goals and how their individual roles can and do at once influence organic search performance and in turn company performance.

I like to have customized meetings that include easy to understand graphics and presentations to show results, reports promoting the work you have done and the results you have achieved. In the final analysis you need to be pro-active in promoting the value of SEO. I have found success by using WebMaster Tool results to show the impact of work done and then having open discussions with that department on what their ideas are to continue the momentum.

If the client is really big, I highly recommended an SEO project manager, who’s sole job is communication. Marketing team rarely have SEO on the top of mind so it is really important to have that “face” within that team.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: code, Information Technology, paid search, SEO, XML

What To Ask Your Link Builder or Company

May 28, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

We all know that link building is the key to success in terms of SEO. Now with all of the algorithmic changes that have happen and are continuing to happen the need to have a quality link builder or link building company handeling your link acquation is very important. Here are some of the questions you need to ask:

Give Me Examples of Sites That Links From Will Help Me?

I like to keep my questions very generic as the goal here is to have the vendor show their knowledge. I am looking for answers that are multi-pronged. This answer should be no different as link building has many different purposes such as reputation management, traffic, and SEO results. If you get only one of these aspects of link building like SEO results than that should tell you what they have been focused on in the past.

How Do You Execute This?

The link builder should have done their homework on your site. They should have at least 3-5 pages that reside on your site that they are going to use as an example to answer this question. If they have not taken the time to give you answers that are specifically for your site or your client’s site then they are not a true professional.

Give Me A Sense Of Your Discovery Strategy?

Your answer should be competitive back link discovery. You want to hear the tools that they are using link Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs. You also want them to give you top competitors that are in your industry but most importantly, you want them to give you what types of content are driving links to their site. Like white papers, videos, articles, guest posts, etc.

Who Is Doing The Link Building?

Bigger link building agencies are going to have many link builders or they might crowdsource it. Just remember that your hiring the company, not the person you are talking possible business with. Don’t be afraid – ask your contact who is going to be the one doing the grunt work. Get them on a call and ask them these questions and get a good sense of how they are going to do the work. I am not saying that a big agency is bad, just to make sure you do your research. Also, don’t forget about the single guy shops are they can be a bigger asset here are they are cook, waiter, and dishwasher when it comes to doing the work.

What Do You Consider Black & Gray Hat Link Building?

I love this question. I mean, I really love this question as it has so many different possible answers. So of course you should get the standard “buying links is bad” and I agree but really the question lies with what they consider is gray hat. Sponsorships? Scholarships? Paid content? Their answers will give you a sense of the risks they will take. Will they mention paid links in a way that they use them?

So, the reality is these questions should get you to a good place in terms of knowing your potential link builder. Like anything else, it really comes down to you and your thoughts on the risks you are willing to take for your website as depending on that there really is not a good or bad answer to any of these questions.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: Open Site Explorer, SEO

Your SEO Agency’s Responsibilities – Do You Know What They Are?

February 9, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Ever since 1995 Internet marketing and search engine optimization has dramatically grown and changed. This growth has manifested itself in the increasing number of businesses using their traditional marketing, pay per click marketing, and media buying budgets to invest in SEO services when they might have traditionally used it to finance other forms of advertising. With the levels of tools available to measure measure traffic and conversion rates while serving content specifically to a targeted user based on their behavior makes it an attractive prospect for businesses looking for another way of reaching their target demographic. As the search engines have grown, so has the marketplace and I see no reason why the industry will still not evolve. The question I ask to you is ” what should you expect from your SEO agency’s evolution”? Because quite honestly they need to.

Search Engine Optimization Expands

Rewind a few years ago and you can see how a standard search engine optimization campaign would largely consist of an expansive link building strategy, precise keyword research and solid on-page optimization. Let’s not fool ourselves, this today is still the staple of SEO and will be but, a whole host of new methods have been adopted by SEO agencies to give their campaigns more substance and bulk. Strategies that include content management and syndication, competitor research, keyword difficulty analysis, search vertical optimising (local, news, video, product, etc.) and perhaps most importantly social media outreach. These are the strategies that are spreading the boundaries of a traditional search engine marketing strategy and they are the ones that have the potential to yield the best results for clients. Is your SEO agency responsible for these new tactics? Have they try to introduce them to you as part of their on-going SEO strategy? Well they should have but to understand how these changes are affecting SEO agencies, it is worth understanding how these agencies are often structured.

The Structural Set Up Of A SEO Agency

Most SEO agencies have departments – Frank is the sales guy and John and Matt are the account managers. They are responsible for being the management for the agency and the client while establishing KPI’s and goals for the campaigns. Jim is the SEO Tech, Judy is the copywriter/link builder while Tony & Phillip are the programmers. While this departmentalization works well if you are going to use the agency specifically for one SEO service line such as link building, holistic SEO campaigns now require employees to have cross-over knowledge to reach the maximum potential for success. Let’s use a specific example. Google’s new “Freshness update” demands a website to produce high quality content regularly. It is now one of the most important aspects of a SEO campaign as it not only gets a website indexed more often, but it can often be used to develop brand awareness and to build an authoritative and diverse link profile for the website that in turn will help the overall organic placement of the site. We also know that this content has to reach the readers and spread throughout the appropriate online communities including social. We do this through good marketing towards various industry relevant blogs, forums and other social media channels – Judy’s (the copywriter) understanding how these blogs or articles will be marketed is essential in order for this content to be much more effective in an SEO campaign.

The Need For Multi Skilled SEO Personnel

Internal communication becomes paramount here as the increase in SEO techniques happen, clarity of internal communication is more important than ever and employees having a cross-over skillset can be hugely beneficial in SEO campaign management. Judy needs to be somewhat of an SEO tech or at least be trained on the basic principles of search engine optimization in order for her to truly be inline with her job duties and the overall performance of the agency. This may seem small and trivial but it really is not. This is a new responsibility for SEO and search marketing agencies as the evolution of the search engines and their more demanding requirements have to be met in order to achieve a high rankings. Will this change an entire SEO agency’s internal structure or blueprint to success? Of course not but it is worth asking your agency about and having them held accountable on focusing on some of the specific changes so that your SEO grows as the search engines do.

Are You A Web Marketer Or A Strategist”?

One of the biggest changes in the history of search engine optimization happened (and continues to evolve) last year called the Google Panda update – a change in the algorithm that has significantly altered modern SEO practices. The Panda update itself extremely complex yet in theory very simple. Bottom line – Google quality testers analysed a collection of websites they thought were of high quality, and a collection they thought were of low quality. Metrics of these websites are reviewed through means that Google has and we has humans do not and then the quality testers work is leveraged via Google’s algorithm which upgrades the sites that people thought were high quality and downgrading the sites that people thought were low quality. The reason this has affected traditional SEO so greatly is because it meant that producing good content, good accessibility and a strong link profile was no longer the high road to success to rank highly as this doesn’t necessarily equate to quality.
In the post-Panda world, these core SEO values still are the strong center of SEO but thought and strategy must be placed on design quality, improving all-round user experience and building a brand that people trust. Ask your SEO agency this – “Are you a web marketer or a strategist”?

What A Good SEO Firm Does

Good and forward thinking SEO agencies have been more than just “top of the funnel” thinkers for years. Good design, testing, website load times, and creating a positive user experience have been in their toolboxes for years. Has your agency talked to you about these things? Now, creating this positive user experience is a primary objective within an SEO strategy and will positively impact rankings. Search engine users crave this and SEO agencies need to embrace this as another step toward producing content-driven results that avoid the ad-heavy websites that marginalise user experience in favor of making a buck.

You as the client need to know that your SEO agency takes on this new responsibilities. It is no longer acceptable for a search engine marketing firm to just provide the basic SEO services like technically accurate content or to build a website that might be biased towards more frequent search engine indexing. But you as the client have the responsibility to hold your SEO agency accountable as well. You need them to be crafting intelligent, compelling, engaging content that visitors will want to share with their friends and need them to come up with the SEO strategy needed that will help your users deem your site as an authoritative website in your industry. Modern SEO is about creativity and striving for an innovative, professional end product that is optimised for search engine marketing and for user experience – observing how SEO develops from here will be fascinating.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: campaigns, optimization, search engine optimization, SEO

Do Your Content Marketing Like UPS

January 30, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Logistics? I mean who seriously uses the word logistics when they want a package shipped? You say to yourself “I got to get this package out to my mom for her birthday” and you run off to a shipping companies website and use their calculator to find an estimate to what it is going to cost and you go from there. Now businesses will look at this a little differently. Wikipedia says “Logistics is the management of the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of destination in order to meet the requirements of customers or corporations. Logistics involves the integration of information, transportation, inventory, warehousing, material handling, and packaging, and often security. Today the complexity of production logistics can be modeled, analyzed, visualized and optimized by plant simulation software, but is constantly changing. This can involve anything from consumer goods such as food, to IT materials, to aerospace and defense equipment.”

So What Does This All Have To Do With SEO Content Marketing?

So before we get into this let me show you a video that I saw yesterday that caught my eye an attention and made me think about this great strategy that UPS is using in order to communicate what logistics means:

Being a big sports fan and UCONN supporter, it was very easy for me to relate to this video knowing who Geno Auriemma is but what I thought was brilliant was how UPS got the boring term of logistics (and what it actually means) and was able to weave it into sports or in this case basketball. So how do we apply this tactic to our SEO and more specifically, our content marketing?

Everyday more and more content is flooding the Internet and to be honest (the majority) it is just regurgitation of something else that has already been written. The challenge is to find new ways to use this content or these topics that are fresh and create interest. Here is a great way I have used some free tools to do this.

The University of San Francisco which offers supply chain management certification is a perfect case study for this article. Hovering in the top 10 for the above term the goal is to move this site up in the rankings through driving quality inbound links from authoritative sites. A great opportunity to do some guest blog outreach here. So let’s take the UPS approach to content marketing shall we?

Step 1 – Use Google Correlate to find high correlated topics for your core terms. In this case we want to write an article about logistics or supply chain management. At this point we are not 100% sure what the specific title or topic will be but we know we are looking to write about these topics in general. So I go into Google Correlate and do a search using “supply chain management” and making sure that I use “compare monthly time series” and this is what was shown:

As you can see from the above image the big thing that jumps out at you is the high correlation between the food industry and supply chain management. Here is a great opportunity now to start really targeting a specific market you want to outreach to. Blogs like food associations and personal chef blogs come right to mind here similar to the way UPS is using basketball right?

Step 2 – Use Google instant to first find what popular topics that contain your keywords. This can be hit or miss for you but this is still a good place to start and as you can see from the image below not that much of a hit but gave us a few ideas:

Step 3 – Do a Google search with your primary keyword and the keyword with the highest Google correlation. In this case we are going to use supply chain management + food industry. This is where the rubber meets the road as your going to find a ton of content that you can leverage. Again, the goal here is not to find something that has already been talked about but to find within these sites areas of opportunities. These are the opportunities you will use to work with blog owners or other websites (or even your own) to create compelling content. Topics that you can mine at this point can be:

Customer requirements
Regulatory requirements
Carrier Availability

Step 4 – Hit the Q&A sites to see if there are any current or past discussions that have taken place. Places like Yahoo Answers, Answers.com, and even LinkedIn are great places do a pulse check.

At this point, you have gotten enough information in front of you to develop the content you need to find the niche audiences out there and make the connections like UPS has done.

So the end result? To end up with a quality guest blog post like the one the University of San Francisco was able to secure on The Importance of Sustainable Supply Chain Management.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized Tagged With: IT

You Have A Great Infographic – Now What?

January 5, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Infographics have become a great tool in the SEO toolbox. So you have come up with a real great one that you know everyone in the world will want but now what? How do you get the world (or the target community) to really give it wings and have it take off? A study done by Milward Brown showed that only 15% of infographics go viral and if you outsource developing this inforgraphic the ROI is pretty risky.

That being said, if you have a good social media strategy or nice database of past/current customers then moving forward with inforgraphics is still a great strategy. Let’s talk about the ways you can promote your new infographic:

Advertise on some social media sites – again the goal of the infographic can be to increase share of voice and what better place to this on social media sites such as facebook? Spending a couple hundred dollars on facebook or stumble upon can assure you that you have put the right target in front of it.
Submit to infographic directories and blogs – kind of self explanatory but these sites thrive on fresh new inforgraphics and the visitors that come to these sites are highly engaged. Some great places to submit are – infographics showcase, column five media’s blog, and infographics directory online.
Create and distribute a press release – I am still a press release fan in terms of them being part of your SEO strategy. A well crafted and distributed press release centered around the creation of the infographic can quickly find a way to your targeted audience.
Leverage social media – honestly this can be done with or without a great social following – it does make it more difficult to leverage this if you do not have a strong social media strategy but you still need to leverage the social community. Some infographic development companies like column five media offer distribution through their social network as part of their development services.
Let your main target market know – have a list of the top 25 to 30 sites you will reach out to prior to having the infographic designed. You can spend thousands of dollars on these things and if you have no idea who to target you will have very little chance to succeed. You need to craft this email specifically for each site and you must convey to each site why this content is valuable to them. Don’t sell it to them though!
Make it shareable and easy to put on their site – the infographic should have its dedicated page on your site and make sure you have social integration. Also, having the code box underneath the infographic so people who want to embed the infographic on their own site have to do nothing more than cut and paste. SEO software company, BrightEdge did a resent study of the top 10,000 websites and showed that nearly 50% of these sites did NOT have social integration.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: SEO

Why You Still Need Meta Descriptions For SEO

January 2, 2012 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

For years now the SEO community has been undecided in whether or not to use meta descriptions as part of their SEO efforts. Since 2009 Google has admitted that the meta description is not used within their algorithm to determine rankings but a well crafted description will greatly impact your click through rate and do other great things for your site including:

It forces Google to highly consider using this as your website snippet instead of just picking content from off your site. Now Google is going to use 160 characters but by having a meta description you can control what is said in that 160 characters.
Your keywords are bolded in the meta description and you can control this.
A better description will give you a higher click through rate and longer site visits because they inform the search engine (and the user) of both the site URL and title. Both of which can lead to higher rankings in Google.
Google recommends them and has lots of great resources on writing them. Seriously, that has to tell you something.

It does seem like Google is ignoring the meta descriptions placed on a page in favor of text they pull themselves from on-page content. In a vast majority of these instances, Google does this when the searched-for-query results in an exact keyword match from on-page content that is not referenced in the meta description.

So if you are working on your own site or a client’s site, there is no way to combat this other than to make sure their most important exact match keywords are represented in their titles and custom meta descriptions. The main point of the meta description snippet in Google results is to entice visitors to click on the link. Thus, having good, well-written meta descriptions that YOU control!

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: SEO, URL

XML Site Maps & HTML Site Maps – Do You Need Both For SEO?

December 19, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

When I talk with a client and recommend that they have both a XML and HTML site map I get the same question – “Why do I need both?” Let’s talk about the differences. An HTML sitemap is a single Web page that is essentially a list of links to all of your site’s Web pages. It provides a means by which a search engine spider can easily find and crawl all of your site’s pages.

An XML sitemap (aka a Google Sitemap, although it’s used by Yahoo and Bing as well) is a special file that provides search engines with specific directives about what pages to crawl and how often. Search engines are not required to strictly obey these directives but they do tend to use them as guidelines.

Every site needs an HTML sitemap. An XML sitemap, on the other hand, is not strictly necessary but I would argue that it is mandatory. Here are several advantages to having one:

You increase the chances that search engines will find all URLs you want indexed.
You can set custom priority scores on all pages to give suggestions to the search engines for more regular crawling.
Your sitemap data is integrated with your other site data in Google Webmaster Central & Bing Webmaster Tools, making these associated tools even more useful.
With the recent Google “freshness” update, it help give a value to time stamped content. An XML sitemap makes it easy to dynamically update last modified dates on the fly.

It is great for sites that have dynamic content or are using “non” search engine friendly development such as AJAX or FLASH.

If you have a brand new site that does not have a good link profile. Google crawls the Web and finds pages by following links from one page to another. If your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for Google to find and index all of your pages.

Your site has a large number of pages that aren’t well linked to each other, or are not linked to at all.

Some industry experts have said that an HTML sitemap is a must-have, while an XML sitemap is not necessary. I disagree as I feel there are many reason to include an XML sitemap while their honestly is not any reasons NOT TO. If your site has pages that are difficult to get or keep indexed, an XML sitemap is the best way to keep search engines instantly and continuously informed of changes to your Web site. It also tells the search engines specifically which pages you would like to be given priority during the indexing process.

Google does a nice job of providing a very good example of a HTML sitemap @ http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

There are many tools out there on the Internet that can help you develop an XML sitemap but here are a few I like:

XML Sitemaps (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/) is a great free one if your site is 500 pages. If it is more than that you can pay $20 for the standalone product. I would like to see them include the news, video, and images xml builders in that cost but they do ask you to pay additional for those tools.

If your site is in WordPress, the Google XML Sitemap plugin by Arne Brachhold is as good as it gets.

G Site Crawler – Flexible Google Sitemap generator for Windows which has options to produce a urllist-file for Yahoo, RSS feed, or an HTML Sitemap.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: crawl, google, HTML, XML

Google Freshess Update – Developing Content That Works

December 12, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

About a month ago, Google announced the introduction of a new update to their Caffeine web indexing system called the “freshness update”. Now Google announced that this update affected 35% of searches with it’s goal of delivering fresher, more recent search results.

The bottom line is that this update was to rank NEWER content HIGHER in the search results for most queries. To see this in action, just visit these sample results in Google for the queries NBA lock-out, Wall Street, Penn State scandal, and football.

What you’ll notice is how the top-served content results (image to right for a search on football) are time stamped and annotated more visually than previously. Some results show these annotations in days, while others are in hours and even minutes (8 minutes ago). The takeaway here is that date-specific content is being served now more than ever before.

Currently, a vast majority of this real-time “fresh” content is tied to the following content areas: breaking news, hot topics (tech, gadgets, etc.), current events, celebrity gossip, video media, sports updates, and customer/product reviews. So you must ask yourself “do I compete in these areas?” or “how can I get the jump on my competitors in my space using these techniques?”

So you have decided to take the plunge and go for it! Awesome! Here are some strategies we recommend you implement to increase your chances of a boost on your own sites:

Get a Blog – We all know what blog means “Better Listings On Google” and this just cements the case. Google has made it clear that the more timely your content is the better. Publishing regular content on a variety of topics, daily, is the best way to accomplish this “timely” requirement. There is no better mechanism available to do this than through a blog. If you don’t have a blog, get one, now!
Be a fisherman – Huh? Well, a good fisherman needs the right bait in order to catch the right fish and in the Internet world it is the same. You need the right bait to attract links (what is called link bait) in order to gather other sites and Google loves to see you site generating more links. Well researched, informative, and entertaining pieces of content can and do bring in thousands of visitors, hundreds of social media signals, and dozens of links, everyday. These types of content pieces, when published on a blog, result in higher rankings and the type of viral impact that Google’s new freshness update will eat up!
Time-Stamps: If you look at any search from the above links that have been impacted by the new update you will notice that ALL of them have time stamps. Meaning that each “freshness” result shows a clear publication date that is pulled by Google directly from the article’s content. Time stamping content is a no-brainer and is relatively easy to do in most blogging software suites. Google recommends you use the following dating format: YYYY-MM-DD, or 2011-12-12.
Press Releases: I have been a big fan of using press releases and using a quality news wire distribution service such as Ereleases.com as a big part of your search engine optimization plan. Nothing says “fresh” and “time-stamped” like a press release but now, in a post-Google “freshness” world, press releases just may be the BEST and FASTEST way to feed the engine a steady stream of the type of frequent content they now appear to be rewarding. A press release however is probably only going to be “fresh” for a couple of days, a week at tops. So consider publishing NEW releases as updates of previous ones that provide more detailed information where possible. This will continually push forward your goal to generate “fresh” content that Google can serve on your behalf.
Get into Google News: A quick story to tell. A major online education portal that I work on was successful in getting listed into Google News as a preferred news provider. The day we got listed into Google News we saw an increase in traffic for that day over last week of 36% and our organic positioning jumped dramatically. We have seen almost a 300% increase in traffic over the last year and I would give a lot of this credit due to our inclusion to Google News! Now the bad news, getting into Google News has become extremely difficult period but for single author/blogger operations to get into Google News it has become even harder. Nevertheless, getting into Google News greatly influences how/if your content will find its way to the top of these new “freshness” results. In a up coming post I will talk about how to increase your chances getting into Google News.
Dynamically Update XML Sitemaps: Hopefully you are using XML sitemaps! If not, start today please! XML sitemaps by default contain time stamps for each crawled URL within the sitemap. Making sure XML timestamps are UPDATED regularly, even hourly, if the content on a page has changed, is now a pretty big deal. If you have a blog of any type (hopefully if you don’t have a blog you will now) there are add-in programs that will help you with creating this XML sitemap and updating it as soon as your content changes.
Becoming One With Social: There is no denying it, the search engines are using social media as a signal to help determine authoritative sites and SEO can not ignore it and needs to embrace social media in order for good placement organically. There is nothing more “fresh” than a Tweet, Stumble, Facebook status update, or a Google +1. Make sure you are using social media both to “push out” your own blog content and to “pull-in” traffic and social signals to that same content. Remember as well that a community of social users can generate MORE content for you. Meaning there is more (fresh) content on your site for Google to serve algorithmically.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: Google News, HIGHER, NEWER, Press Releases

Google Pagination – How They Now Handel It

October 3, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Google’s New Way Of Dealing With Pagination

While at SMX East a few weeks ago, I had attended one of the seminar tracks in which the “experts” talked about handling pagination. The big announcement was made by Google. Google has been focused on the pagination of content, or content that spans more than one page. Google’s mission is to make all the information available on one page when a user searches for it.

Google now has the ability to analyze pages that are setup in this way and automatically combine it. If you’d like to make Google’s job easier, they’ve suggested a few ways to help.

First, if you have a view all page that your paginated content leads to, Google recommends the use of the “rel=canonical” tag and have the subpages point towards your view all page. This helps Google recognize the page structure making it easier for them to create a page with all the content visible.

Google also suggests that you use “rel=prev” or “rel=next” to point to the previous or next pages in a series of paginated content. This can be combined with the”rel=canonical” tag to create an even smoother experience for Google as well as users.

If you or your users prefer a paginated view, or maybe your view all page takes a really long time to load, you can keep this setup by using a “noindex” tag.

Google has also stated that if you’re feeling too lazy or too busy, that’s cool too, because they officially are working on doing it all themselves anyhow. However, when you correctly apply the above tags to your site then you leave nothing up to interpretation as they’re working the bugs out. Plus, you get the benefit of this update sooner rather than later.

One of the big things that the Google representative did talk about is “user experience” and page load times as they (Google) looks to keep load times to 1/2 of a second as their benchmark. It is important to understand the undertones that are being sent by these representatives and this was one that they were really saying loud and clear. If your “view all” page takes to long to load then it is not going to be right tactic for you to use.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: code, coding, crawl, developing, google, paginate, pagination, rel

Law Firm Marketing & Attorney Internet Marketing Ideas

August 24, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

In part one of our Internet marketing for law firms we talked about things like Email marketing, SEO, and attorney web design services. We are now going to expand on this some to give a more rounded approach to law firm marketing. Again, a key approach to any successful attorney Internet marketing strategy whether for a law firm or a plumber is to have it be multi-pronged so that you may not be so dependent on specific strategy such as search engine optimization while capitalizing on all ways to gather traffic for visitors looking for attorney services.

Law Firm Contextual Marketing

Contextual marketing is one of the smartest techniques that can be employed in attorney internet marketing. It’s smart in the sense that it brings relevant and desirable content to the user. It works in quite an interesting way: While a user is surfing a page, the tool will analyze the content on hand to identify the interests and needs of the user. After processing the results, the page will return advertisements, which are of great relevance to the user. Using the history of viewed pages and other similar techniques, contextual marketing sends targeted offers instantaneously.

Law firms can equally benefit from this technology. What they have to do, is subscribe their website to an ad serving website that manages advertisements on several high traffic websites. As a result, when a user is browsing a page and is found to be observing content with keywords, for example, business legal solutions, the ad serving website will automatically bring up your website advertisement. This is an efficient method to attract targeted audience and increase conversion rates.

Social Media Marketing for Attorneys

Social media has reshaped how we communicate with each other. New platforms are constantly coming along. So, just when you believe that you know everything about it, a new feature drops in. For example, just recently LinkedIn has launched a new feature – Company Pages. This complements the previous one called Company Profile, which provided quite limited information about the company. Lawyers can now use the latest feature to share more detailed information about their law firms.

Another important medium is Twitter. Research concerning the usage of Twitter by the largest 100 legal firms, was published in the Boston Business Journal. The results revealed that only 15% of the firms have their firm-branded accounts. However, there are a number of convincing reasons to use Twitter.

You will stay in contact with people, as people begin to follow you. Although, you may conclude from scarce comments, that no one is hearing you, they are.
At least, search engines are hearing you. Using a Twitter account is an effective way to get your website displayed in search results.

Law Firm Blogs

Blogs integrated into law firm web sites can prove to be an effective tool of internet marketing for lawyers. A blog can help lawyers increase their visibility on the internet, show their expertise in specific areas and prove their metal. Lawyers can demonstrate their knowledge in their subject by writing fresh blogs or commenting on others.

Search engines have more affinity to blogs than to other typical web sites. Whenever a blog is published, search engines are automatically alerted about it. While content on other websites waits to be searched by search engines, blogs come into notice automatically. Using blogs can significantly increase your visibility on the internet and make your website more accessible.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: Boston Business Journal, Company Pages, Company Profile, Law Firm Blogs