My short answer?

Forget about the search engines and start thinking about your customer.

To understand why, there’s a quick story for you, a list of fundamental questions you need to consider and then an outline of how you can tie it all together.

Quick story:

Once upon a time, Bluewire Media’s website was nowhere to be found on Google when you typed in “web design brisbane” – a pretty competitive keyword. This was not acceptable for a web strategy consultancy, so we set out to improve our ranking.

We used 2 sources: We posed a few questions to Reload Media and read Glenn Murray’s SEO Secrets e-book.

Armed with a better understanding of how the search engines worked, we were able to get to the first page of results. It was a good step but we still wanted #1.

We then focussed on “thinking like a publisher” courtesy of David Meerman Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”. We co-created the Web Strategy Planning Template with him and started to share much more content with our audience. The number of our back links increased dramatically and from high quality web sites like News.com.au courtesy of journalists and other visitors finding our blog and content useful.

In the process, we saw major fluctuations of our rankings and our competitors’. Some websites that had been on the first page for years vanished to the anonymity of page 4 or 5. Our own ranking bounced around as Google changed their search algorithm with countless small tweaks and a couple of major overhauls.

Ultimately our ranking improved over a few months until we were #1 for “web design Brisbane” (where we stayed for 3 years) and quite a few others. We’ve recently dropped to #2 but that’s ok, we’ll be back (my logic is next).

It’s time to consider some fundamental questions:

Why does a person use a search engine?

To find information.

What then is the purpose of a search engine?

The sole purpose of a search engine is to help a searcher find the information they are looking for.

Why will a searcher return to use a search engine again?

A searcher will return if the results of their search are useful.

How will a searcher choose one search engine over another?

Primarily by the usefulness of the results. A secondary consideration is the speed of the delivery of those results.

How does a search engine make money?

By having searchers click on sponsored links or pay per click advertising. The more people search, the more likely they are to click on the paid links. The more often people search, the more often they will click on the paid links. The more often they click, the more money the search engine makes.

Who is the searcher?

The searcher is YOUR customer, YOUR prospect, YOUR future No.1 referrer, a journalist looking for a good story in YOUR industry. The list goes on.

So if the searcher wants useful results and the search engines make money by delivering useful results, what do you think will drive your business’s long term search engine rankings?

USEFULNESS, to your customer or buyer persona, in everything you do on the web will drive your long term search engine rankings.

How can you do this?

• By genuinely knowing your customer or buyer persona.
• By understanding your customers’ problems and providing great content to help them solve it.
• By structuring your web strategy around your searcher or buyer persona not around your products (try using our web strategy planning template if you need help).
• By knowing what they a looking for and knowing what they are typing into the search engines and using their language, not some mumbo jumbo, jargon filled rubbish.
• By providing such interesting/useful/entertaining/valuable content that people will link to it and share it – thereby building QUALITY back links that create long term sustainable rankings, not junk links from an unrelated forum.
• By building content so it will be picked up not just by your customers but by journalists who will share it with a larger audience.
• By having landing pages that your customers find useful and that are relevant to what they are looking for.
• By refreshing your content regularly to demonstrate that you care about the issues your customers are facing.

Yes there is a place for Search Engine Optimisation to achieve short term results using technical changes, backlinking and other techniques. But do you seriously think trying to keep up with every change made to the ultra secret search engine algorithm by Google’s 31,000 employees (qualified by this type of entry exam) is a sustainable strategy?

Their algorithms are going to continue to refine, to reduce the impact of technical details like metadata, to build in the social proof as demonstrated by the number of tweets and likes and comments and check-ins and reviews and ratings and quality of authorship….. Then the next big thing will come along and swamp everything we know about today and demand more change from our businesses.

But the one thing you can count on is that search engines servicing their customers will be at the heart of it.

Don’t waste your time trying to keep up with every tweak made by collective brain power of the world’s best and brightest – get the basics right and then focus on your customer. If what you do is in their best interests, if you’re genuinely adding value with everything you do, then you can be sure the search engines will catch up and reward you handsomely for it.

So… what do you think? Is SEO dead?

Here is a transcript:

Two major tips for SEO that are often overlooked are:

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools

Most people have got Google Analytics setup but they haven’t got Google Webmaster Tools setup. The reason you need Google Webmaster Tools set up is because it will tell you everything Google knows is wrong with your site and that is right with your site. Quite often a lot of sites don’t even know that Google hates them and the reason that Google hates them is all outlined in Google Webmaster Tools.

2. Publish often

The second tip is publish often because since the advent of Google Caffeine, Google likes to see fresh content more than ever. I know that it’s something we’ve always said , but since July last year if your competitor was publishing more often than you are chances are Google is going to favour that site over yours.

Thanks Jim!

You can follow @jimboot on Twitter or visit StewArtMedia.biz for an SEO specialist.

Marketing in The Age of Google (by Vanessa Fox) is an insightful book about search, how it’s impacted the web and our lives, and how to make the most of it for business.

Vanessa goes into detail about the specifics of search engine optimisation and how search engines can be used for business planning, research and testing. i definitely agree with the tag line: “Your online strategy IS your business strategy”. The information is good, tying together the various concepts and tools available with examples and diagrams.

The parts that stood out for me were these quotes (bolding mine):

According to leaked 2008 Google quality guidelines, utility (how helpful the page is for the searcher based on intent), “is the most important aspect of search engine quality.”

A much better strategy is to focus on what the search engines are trying to achieve with all of those algorithm tweaks – showing the most relevant results for a given query.

Remember, the customers remain the same – they are simply adapting new behaviours to take advantage of the world of search.

What does this mean for you?

Don’t wait for the search engines, get ahead of them.

How? 3 steps:

1. Be useful.
2. Be relevant.
3. Be easy to use.

Because the customers haven’t changed, only the way they are finding information!

The reality is, if you are all of these things, the search engines will eventually catch up to you. With 26,316 seriously smart people at Google, (not to mention all the staff at Yahoo!, Bing and the others), they are bound to tweak their algorithms to catch up and deliver the most relevant and useful results.

[Side note: It was great to see that Vanessa's concepts closely aligned with our Web Strategy Planning Template, particularly the idea of "search personas" mirroring "buyer personas".]

Recently, Bluewire Media has claimed the #1 spot from John Hacking, who has dropped from #1 to page 2 (any ideas why?). If you looked at the home page of the Bluewire Media website however, you might be confused as to how we’ve made it to the number one spot. There’s no heading saying “Web Design Brisbane”, the words “Web Design” and “Brisbane” appear only once each in the browser title tag, and they’re not together or near the start. In fact, the phrase “Web Design Brisbane” or “Brisbane Web Design” doesn’t even appear anywhere on the page.

Compare this with the companies who share spots 2-10, most of whom start their titles with “Web Design Brisbane”, and you’ll be left to wonder why Bluewire Media is even on the first page.

Well, if you know anything about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you’ll know that inbound links (links from someone else’s site back to your site) play a huge factor in getting your site to rank higher in search results. A quick scan of the number of links pointing to each of the top 10 websites reveals that Bluewire Media has roughly 24,000 inbound links, while the rest of the top 10 have between 1,000 and 10,000 inbound links (with a couple of exceptions).

Search results for "Web Design Brisbane" using SEOBook's SEO Toolbar to display link data

Fair enough, you might say, until you hear that Bluewire Media does not actually offer SEO services directly (apart from ensuring the websites we build are search engine friendly, we refer our clients to our SEO partners, Reload Media, for all their other SEO needs). How then, have we managed to get twice or three times the number of links that our competitors have, most of whom offer SEO and linkbuilding services?

Well, at Bluewire Media, we’re big believers that the best way to market your business online is to give something of value away for free. Our free Web Strategy Planning Template, co-created with international keynote speaker and best-selling author David Meerman Scott has been downloaded and used by thousands of businesses worldwide to help them define their web strategy.

By giving this template away for free, we’ve managed to not only get our logo and contact details into the offices of hundreds of companies Australia wide, but also to get hundreds (and eventually thousands) of links from webmasters and bloggers who have found it useful and wanted to share it with their audiences, and in doing so have helped us achieve our number one ranking.

We try to recommend to most of our clients that they write an e-book or similar and give it away for free, but many of them, being business-people, just can’t get their head around the concept; and it’s often hard to think of all the right arguments to convince them on the spot. Here, I’ve outlined here what happens when you give away for free something other people thing is pretty valuable.

The process:

1. You publish something (let’s call it a widget) that people would pay for (because it’s that good), but instead you give it away for free. It could be a free e-book, an online tool or app, a printable template or checklist (like ours), or even just a great blog post!
2. People read or use your widget and find it valuable. It’s so good that they can’t resist telling their friends and followers about it using social media (especially if you make it easily shareable). This spreads your brand name and increases your reputation.
3. If your free widget is good enough, eventually it will create enough of a social media storm that people will start blogging about it (hello backlinks!).
4. People who read those blog posts will then know about you and your free widget, and if they find it valuable enough, they’ll tell their own friends and followers.
5. This cycle goes on and on while your brand name is being spread further and further and your reputation is skyrocketing.
6. You now have a first-class reputation, and your customers come to you ready to buy your products/services because they’ve read about you, seen your work and trust your expertise.

But why does it have to be free?

Making your widget free means that when someone comes across it, they don’t have to deliberate over whether they can afford it or whether it will be worth the money, they don’t have to get up and walk across the room to get their credit card details (don’t under-estimate the laziness of the general population), and they have no reason to trust that your widget will do what you claim it will. If it’s free, however, there is absolutely no reason why someone wouldn’t use/read/download it right then and there and be blown away by how valuable it is. Basically, by making it free, you’re allowing it to spread faster and further.

Want to learn more?

[Edit: Lesley has linked to an excellent video in the comments. If you're interested to know more, please have a look]

David Meerman Scott is a thought leader in this field, and has some great books that really help clarify exactly why you should give something away for free. I recommend buying and reading his book ‘World Wide Rave’ (we’ve got some copies in the office if you’d like to borrow one) and downloading some of his free e-books (yes that’s right, he practices what he preaches).

Are you convinced?

A lot of people will remain un-convinced, especially if they think they’re in an industry that this doesn’t apply to. Really though, if you have a product or service and you have a website, there’s a way that it can work for you: you just need to be creative.

If you’re having a hard time thinking of a way to do this in your industry, leave a comment explaining your situation and I’ll think of one for you!

It details how the main pages for these various products stacked up in their own search results and how they fair across a number of common SEO topics. It was designed to provide the product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimisations. These optimisations were intended to not only help search engines understand the content of their pages better, but also to improve the users’ experience when visiting their sites.

What did I learn?

• Google, arguably the biggest & best search engine, still has to consciously think about search engine optimisation.
• By following simple rules you can greatly improve both your search engine rankings and your users experience of your website.

They’ve released the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters can learn from the report, which is filled with a heap of great examples taken straight from their products’ pages. It’s an interesting read, and shows that even the Google team make mistakes when it comes to some of the simple rules of SEO.

SEO Brisbane: If you’d like some help optimising your website and getting found on Google, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

Disclaimer: The C+ image was created and added to give my post a little colour. Google and their products don’t necessarily deserve a c+, this was merely added for illustration purposes. Google, you get a A+ in my books, keep up the great work and keep releasing these great resources and products!

Glenn was generous enough with his time to do this interview with us.  Thanks Glenn!

If you stay all the way through the 17 minutes, you’re in for a treat, it’s a cracker!

In Part 1, Glenn asnwers:

1. In your SEO Secrets ebook, you talk about the importance of blogging – just how important is blogging for SEO?
2. Can you share your story of how blogging has impacted your own SEO copywriting business, Divine Write?

In Part Two, Glenn answers:

1. How much time should you commit to blogging?
2. What tips can you give to speed up getting traction on your blog?
3. Who are your favourite bloggers?
4. Finally, who should buy your ebook “SEO Secrets” & why?

Follow Glenn Murray on Twitter via @divinewrite.

Take his advice and check out these blogs: Jonathan Crossfield, ProBlogger, Angie’s Copywriting, Frontal Cortex and Blogging Teacher.

SEO Secrets

SEO Copywriting

We’ve followed Glenn’s advice in his brilliant ebooks SEO Secrets ($79.95 USD) and Practical SEO Copywriting ($39.97 USD)

As proof it works, Bluewire has made it to #3 for Web Design Brisbane (the most competive keyword phrase in our industry)!

Set up your blog: if you’d like help setting up your blog (using what we know from Glenn), call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

And of course there’s Glenn Murray’s web design company Silver Pistol to try as well!

But one particular area of knowledge has helped me immensely, not only with the work I do here, but also with my side projects – search engine optimisation.

About six months ago the team had a quarterly priority to take on and participate in some P.D - The goal was to learn something new or extend our knowledge in a topic. I picked SEO.

There was an ulterior motive in this selection since my partner and I had just  launched the website for Home Spa, a mobile beauty & day spa business servicing the Brisbane area. Starting from scratch and having no real client base to build from, we really needed to be found in search engines before any business came our way.

Just today I’ve noticed we have improved the rankings for a couple of our targeted keywords which has increased the number of leads, and eventually appointments, we get through the website. I was proud of my ongoing efforts so thought I’d share some of the useful tools I’ve used along the way.

While they won’t necessarily help you get to #1, (I’ll leave that to the experts), these tools are super useful in tracking your progress:

Analytics gives you a plethora of information about how your users are finding your website, what they’re doing there and what they had for breakfast the morning they visited (well almost).  I’ve recently found creating custom reports to be particularly useful. With these we’re able to pull out quality information like which particular keywords are resulting in turning visits into conversions (or appointment requests in our case).

Another Google product – (yes I love them) is Google Webmaster Tools. It gives you a whole lot more specific information on what your website looks like to Google and where you appear in the index. If you can see the world through the Google Bots‘ eyes it will go a long way in helping to understand why certain tweaks to your code & copy help your rankings.

A great tip I got from a  friend over at Reload Media was to check out the SEOMoz.org website. It has a number of free SEO tools you can use along with a heap of quality information on their blog on SEO in general. You have to create an account but a basic account is free.

Rank Tracker is one of such free tools on the site, allowing you to track your ranking in various search engines for particular keywords. It also keeps a history of your searches so you can view your progress over time.

The above screenshot is the rank history for ‘Home Spa’ for the keyword phrase ‘mobile beauty Brisbane’.

The results I found using Rank Tracker:

• When I first checked in November, we were nowhere to be seen and outside the top 50.
• By January 19 we had improved and moved to #8
• This week we’ve hit #4!

What SEO tools do you use?

SEO Brisbane: If you’d like some help optimising your website and getting found on Google, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

Why?  Two reasons.

1.  ‘What you know’ is very important. It matters to Google, therefore it matters! Your search engine rankings are based primarily on the content you publish on your website.  If you don’t publish what ‘you know’ about XYZ then you won’t appear in search results for XYZ.   On the web you are what you publish.

2. “It’s not who you know, but who knows you.” Links are the currency of the web and the ones you want are inbound links.  The second factor that determine’s your Google rank is the quality and quantity of inbound links.  So, whilst you may ‘know everyone’ on the web, if they don’t know you, they won’t link to you.  And if you don’t receive any link love, then your search results will suffer. On the web it’s very important to be known (and linked to) by other people!

A useful, free tool for seeing who links to you is BackLinkWatch.com

Of course, ‘what you know’ and ‘who knows you’ are beautifully aligned. If you have useful, relevant content on your website (what you know), then it’s much more likely that people will link to you (who knows you)!

I wonder what other popular sayings don’t hold true on the web?

SEO Copywriting Brisbane: If you’d like to know more about writing about what you know & attracting quality inbound links, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

I’ll confess, 12 months ago SEO wasn’t part of our marketing strategy.  Yet in one year, we’ve climbed from unfindable to #3 for competitive search phrases like:

‘website design brisbane‘ (#3)
‘web designers brisbane‘ (#3)
‘website designers brisbane‘ (#3)
‘web design brisbane‘  (dropped to #4 today, it was #3…)

Being competitive, I’m striving for #1 in all those categories, but so is every other web design company out there. Healthy competition is good and I enjoy the challenge!

What’s the Secret?
Well, there really is no secret.  Despite what some SEOs will have you believe, there’s no magic to topping Google.  If you follow the rules, you’ll get there!

But I do want to acknowledge and thank my ‘SEO mentors‘ from whom I have learnt everything I know.  I can definitely attribute our success to our friends at Reload Media (Bluewire’s SEO partner) and also to SEO copywriter Glenn Murray who wrote the brilliant e-books SEO Secrets and SEO Copywriting. Thanks guys.

In a sentence, I’ve learnt that if you focus on producing the most interesting, relevant & useful content for your buyers, you’ll automatically be optimising your website.

But that isn’t juicy enough is it…? So, here are the:

Top 5 things I’ve done to reach #3 on Google:

1.  Commit to a keyword phrase to optimise for.
In my case, I chose Web Design Brisbane and two or three obvious combinations that are similar.  This decision was based on the high search volume for this phrase.

2. Align Web Copy, Page Title and Page Description with your keyword phrase.
My chosen keyword phrase Web Design Brisbane appears consistently in my Web Copy, Page Title and Page Description.. BUT it shouldn’t be too repetitive for a human since Google is smart enough to know what the page is about if you only mention it once in each.

Page Title & Description

3. Get Quality Backlinks
I changed the footer tags on all the websites we built to Web Design Brisbane by Bluewire Media. You could also write testimonials for suppliers or write articles for other websites and put back links on them. I do both.   You’ll also notice I use the keyword phrase as the anchor text not the company name.  This is an important habit to get into.

Anchor text on back links

4. Blog every week
I try to blog every week with useful information for our prospective buyers. This means there is fresh, keyword rich content that Google loves (and more importantly, so do people reading the blog)! If it’s a popular blog post, people will link to it.  This is known as ‘link bait‘ – content so good that other people will link to it!

Blog at least once a week

5. Tweet every blog post
I tweet every single blog post to our followers. If the blog post is interesting enough people will retweet it and more people will read it.  And if people really like it they’ll link back to the blog (which helps our Google ranking).

Tweet every blog post

What’s our #3 ranking meant for Bluewire’s business?
Well now we have on average 5-10 qualified web enquiries per week that found us through Google… And we’ve doubled our traffic to ~500 unique visitors each week.

We aren’t #1 (yet), but I’ll let you know if we make it!

SEO Brisbane : If you’d also like to see the view from the top of Google, give Bluewire Media a call on 1300 258 394.

From lists, headings, bold text & captions, to tricks to check you’re on track; here are some of my favourite tips that he shares:

Wordle is a nifty website that can help you see your web copy much the way that Google sees it. It will show you by way of a word cloud visual which words in your copy are the most frequently used. All you need to do is enter your text into the box and hit ‘Go’.

Here’s what Bluewire Media’s homepage looks like:

Web Copy For Bluewire Media's Homepage

Considering we are a web design agency, and they are among our most prominent words in the image – we can see we’re on track with our copy – letting Google know what our site is about, whilst still (and most importantly) making perfect sense to humans.

Secondly, Murray stresses that it’s important to target one keyword per page, or group of pages. As a web design agency in Brisbane, we would of course target web design – but what about everything else we offer? SEO Copywriting, Email Marketing, Domains & Hosting, Internet Strategy and Updates & Support (to name a few!) also need to be optimised.

The great thing about that is – if a page is about SEO copywriting, it makes sense that you’ll be using that phrase a whole lot anyway!

When it comes to the actual copywriting, Murray has shared a slew of practical advice using the way both humans and Google read & understand copy as a starting point.

Headings:

Humans love headings – it helps us decide what it is we’re reading about very quickly, without having to take in the whole body of text. Google recognises that & so it rates headings as one of the most important factors in deciding what a page is about. So, the moral of the story?

Optimise your headings! BUT – make sure you don’t just use your keywords out of context, headings should be totally indicative of that section. Your readers come first!

An example of this is: SEO Copywriting – Making Sense To Humans & Google
Read: Keywords – Context

Lists:

Another device that helps readers make sense of large bodies of information is the trusty list. They’re great for:

• Scanning over & getting a quick summary,
• Persuading the reader of the key points; and
• Optimising your copy – again, Google knows people like lists, so Google likes them too.

If possible, limit your bullet points, lists lose their value if they go on & on. Also, the closer your keywords are to the bullet point, the better.

Bold:

People use bold words as hooks. And yet again, Google has taken its cue from the way a human visitor acts – bold words are important to us so bold words are important to Google. Glenn Murray points out though – what is important to the customer might be different to what’s important to a reader looking for benefits. So it’s important to strike a balance.

Links:

When linking to other pages, Google assumes that the first two words of the link are really important & indicate what the page you’re linking to will be about. It will assume that what you’re linking to is relevant to the content you’re covering too.

The thing is, if you really want your audience to follow the link (& find it helpful & in turn, find your page helpful) then engagement should come first. A ‘read how’ start to a link might be better than keywords in the long run.

Captions:

Used to describe images, captions are mostly redundant to the human eye. BUT – Google can’t understand imagery, so captions are a very important way for Google to figure out what you’re on about. With that in mind, ALWAYS start captions with keywords.

Variants:

Google is smart enough to know that if your page is about SEO copywriting, your page will also use stems or variants of that phrase. It will pick up on lots of different combinations so you can mix your keyword phrases up as much as you can creatively manage whilst still making sense. You can also break your phrase up with grammar.

For example: Need help understanding SEO? Copywriting tips from leaders in the field….

That said, keep the words in the phrase right next to each other where possible, they’re much more effective that way.

Not one to miss anything important, Glenn Murray has included length guidelines for effective SEO copywriting. He suggests:

• 100-150 words for a homepage – it’s important for most valuable information to be “above the fold” (in view without needing to scroll down),
• 250-500 words for pages lower in the site hierarchy – this might include product or service pages or “about us” pages; and
• 300-1000 words for blog posts

And lastly, true to being a copywriter – Murray reminds his readers that it’s all about the benefits to the reader. So, to get people to read your site you need an effective headline and description for your Google listing.

Your description meta tag isn’t used for ranking – so think of it as ad copy and don’t bother trying to optimise. But your heading? It’s of utmost importance.

The four criteria for a successful headline:

1. Spark personal interest,
2. Offer a quick, easy way,
3. Share some news; and
4. Incite curiosity

SEO Copywriting

You can also buy it online.

SEO Copywriting Brisbane: If you’d like Bluewire Media to help you climb the Google ladder get in touch on 1300 258 394.