What Your Web Designer Doesn’t Know Can Hurt You… a lot.

by David Bruce Jr on 2012/05/07

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

Web Designers Agenda versus YOUR Agenda

 

1) They want you to have a website, not a CMS
…do you want to have to pay for each little edit? A blog is a CMS (content management system) I once explained to a local SEO client what a blog was… he remarked “so it’s a website that sorta updates itself?”… Right on the money

2) They want you to host YOUR website on THEIR server
… Don’t do it, you want to own your own site, YOU want control over YOUR site… see #1, or do you want to have to pay for each little edit?

3) They want you to think by having a “prettier” website will increase conversions…
Technically, it should… but not if your website isn’t ranking.

Visual Aesthetics are useless with Google rankings. Google cannot even see them

Graphics are invisible to Google. In the advertising/ marketing industry they have a word for this: Creatives, creative are visual representations designed to create associations in the prospective customers minds… those are targeted towards the customers Right Brain.

Google has a lobotomy, Google does not possess a Right Brain

Google runs on a mathematical algorithm, it is AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Google cannot make subjective distinctions, it cannot tell you WHY the Mona Lisa is beautiful.

All it can tell you is a “disproportionate number of people with Masters Degrees who tend to go to the opera and have passports and are in a certain tax bracket…seem to like the Mona Lisa.

4) They want you to think SEO is all about ON SITE optimization
Web designers are not link builders, they tend to not want you to realize that free blogs on important sub domains are as valuable, if not MORE valuable to your website’s domain authority than the internal site structure of your website. Your website is their “masterpiece” and they view themselves as your Rembrandt

5) They do NOT want to get into the content creation business
Web Designers are not journalists, they want YOU to provide the copy for your website, they do not want you to know that it’s the copywriting that determines your ranking in Google and your sales conversion. You may know how to sell your product or service but it’s almost a given that you do NOT know how to write content for a website.

People do not read website copy the same way they read a book or a novel.

There is an art to crafting compelling content on a website or a blog. A question that begs a question… you’ve got to write so the reader has just “gotta see where you’re going with that”

Most web designers avoid content creation like the plague: they prefer to let you, the business owner provide the sales copy.  Big mistake… HUGE mistake. Web Designers (and graphic design folks) work from a common context, and that context has been turned om it’s head.

Push Marketing is dead

Pull Marketing is king

 

The meteoric rise of social media has forever altered the balance of power:

In the old paradigm, you could “get away with” push marketing, you could simply Ram Your Message Down Their Throat

…For 80 years this was an acceptable marketing premise   Google matters more than it once did,  SEO matters more, a LOT more than it once did, Local SEO matters a Hell of a lot more than it once did.

 

By David Bruce Jr (Google+ Profile)

A website is a sales copy delivery system

… Ranking is the first step, We provide effective sales copy for Search Engine Marketing AFTER we get you the number one spot in Google for the keywords your customers are searching for.

You need the phone to ring! Frederick Web Promotions makes your phone ring.

Local SEO Consulting from Frederick Web Promotions

240 397-9804

 

 

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Geographical Google Juice

by David Bruce Jr on 2012/04/22

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

Geographical Google Juice or Local SEO

Back links are exponentially more valuable (in the eyes of the ranking algorithm )

*IF the backlinks are coming in the form of social signals from your intended target market*

For example, if your site sold travel packages to Italy, but all of your sites social signals came from people who
A) never had a passport
B) there is no evidence that the person ever flew …

Note much chance of ranking.
On the other hand a comparatively few social signals came from people who just bought luggage…and have mortgages…

(Google can tell all of that)

Pre Panda, if you wanted to, you could buy 5000 fake FB likes
Pre Panda, if you wanted to (and I got a LOT of business from local companies that got caught doing this) you *used to be able to* open 3 yahoo accounts and leave yourself fake reviews on citation websites (Yelp, Insiderpages, ETC)

Post Panda, not only is the “document” being scored by Google…
Now the Author, the person doing the submission, gets a score

… it doesn’t stop there, the people WHO voted you up, liked, commented, favorited, retweeted, shared, saved to their social bookmarks Those people get scored.

 

The distinction between “social media marketing” and search engine marketing is blurring, post Panda, you can no longer do one without the other.

If you run a local business, which is to say if you seek more business within one zipcode.. friend everybody in that zip code:

If they have a pulse, a Facebook and a twitter, and are in your zipcode they’re eligible.

They are your constituents
They are who vote your website into office

1/4 to 1/3 of your social bookmarking and your various streams (twitter stream, FB news feed, G+ stream) ought to be:
By, For and About your geographical area.. not YOUR business, not even your industry or your genre.

Open up your Delicious acct and save the Wikipedia listing for the largest city in your county, rinse, repeat.

By David Bruce Jr

A website is a sales copy delivery system

… Ranking is the first step, We provide effective sales copy for Search Engine Marketing AFTER we get you the number one spot in Google for the keywords your customers are searching for.

You need the phone to ring! Frederick Web Promotions makes your phone ring.

Local SEO Consulting from Frederick Web Promotions

240 397-9804

 

 

Googleplus First Generation Google+ User appliance-repair-boise-idaho Google Places Consultant

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Blog Post Title Max Length

by David Bruce Jr on 2012/04/04

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

How long should the title to our blog posts be?

 

 

I just learned something while working on the Local SEO for http://www.hav-a-lawnandgarden.com/

The web developer and the local SEO (that’d be me) is  rebuilding the entire site in WordPress
An issue came up the the length of each blog post title and Google truncating or chopping off a title after X number of characters.

We’re making 2 WP blogs inside of (or within) one main WP blog so the url structure is http://www.hav-a-lawnandgarden.com/
34 characters
Existing sub directory is http://hav-a-lawnandgarden.com/naturalawn-lawn-care-solutions/
62 characters

While researching this I spotted a Facebook friend ( Rick Thomas )recent blogger blog post
http://ftmyersmarketing.blogspot.com/2012/04/naples-florida-panel-to-discuss.html

76 characters max
The title was truncated after the word “discuss”
in his blog post title:
Naples Florida Panel To Discuss Blogging For Business Purposes
consists of 63 characters
Add in the domain name’s (http://ftmyersmarketing.blogspot.com/) total 37 characters and we now know why the title was “too long”

What does this mean for how long our blog post titles should be?

Domain name (37 characters) plus blog title (63 characters) equals 100 characters… but all we see in the browser bar is 76 of those 100 characters

Hmm, So I now recommend you add up the total characters of your blog domain name… then knowing the max length is 76 characters… bear that max length in mind when crafting a title for your blog post titles.. don’t think of it as a max limit

…because we *Do want to write FOR humans*, just keep your main keyword phrase within that limit for *Max Google Juice*

So what did Andrew M. Smith and I determine from this?

We’re chopping off some characters of the sub directory
http://hav-a-lawnandgarden.com/naturalawn-lawn-care-solutions/
(62 characters)
will now become
Now subtract 45 from 76 and we now know to ensure our best keywords are in the first 31 characters (or remember to put our most important keywords into the first half of a blog post title)
Update: That 76 character limit was on a blogger.com blog post, I just saw a non blogger post that was 86 characters in the browser bar.

Even so, it behooves us to ensure our best keywords and keyword phrases are closer to the beginning of a blog post.

hav-a-lawnandgarden.com

The health of Maryland’s hemlocks, and the associated ecosystems, is being threatened by the hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA). This small, exotic insect is native to Asia, and was first found in North America in British Columbia in the1920’s. It was reported in Richmond, Virginia in 1951, and spread nor…

A website is a sales copy delivery system

… Ranking is the first step, We provide effective sales copy for Search Engine Marketing AFTER we get you the number one spot in Google for the keywords your customers are searching for.

You need the phone to ring! Frederick Web Promotions makes your phone ring.

Local Google Advertising from Frederick Web Promotions

240 397-9804

 

 

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SEO Copywriting vs Writing For a Human Audience

by David Bruce Jr on 2012/03/25

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

*SEO Copywriting vs Writing For a Human Audience*

Much is written about crafting quality content and improving your websites ranking in Google. Typically a marketing department (mistakenly) assumes their task is to write compelling copy to attract a human audience… ultimately it is.

*Googlebot is part of your audience* | arguably the ranking algorithm is the “bigger half” of said audience.

Google Has A Lobotomy

That algorithm is artificial intelligence, it can not really “read”, it also can not make subjective distinctions. *Google does not possess a “right brain”, it has a lobotomy*

If your copy relies on making symbolic connections crafted to make associations of your product or brand and a feeling (remember the Pepsi Generation?)

Google is genetically incapable of making those associations.

All of your marketing department graphics (in advertising parlance they even refer to them as “creatives”) are invisible to Google

Conventional Marketing Creative Graphics Useless For SEO
Googlebot cant tell the difference between the Mona Lisa and a little kids water color.

*It can’t “parse” Shakespeare, it can’t even read, not really.. it cant “see” either, it Google’s algorithm “sees” in braille*

If you fail to translate all of the “documents” that describe your domain, your product, your brand… if you fail to translate all of that into “braille”, Google does not see you.

If a tree falls in the Forrest and Google didn’t hear it.. there never was a tree

or
You need Google a LOT more than Google needs you

the only thing I’d add is to Lead With Your Keywords, more importantly keyword phrases. Google pays particular attention to the Title, sub headings and bolded text, and the ranking algorithm is heavily influenced by the ORDER you type, similar to MS autocorrect or spell check, it attempts to guess what it is your are searching for when you begin a query (that’s what a search is, it is a query),

For Example: if your opening line was “Welcome to my website…” Google would mistakenly assume you were competing with Hallmark Greeting Cards or the Welcome Wagon

A website is a sales copy delivery system

… Ranking is the first step, We provide effective sales copy for Search Engine Marketing AFTER we get you the number one spot in Google for the keywords your customers are searching for.

You need the phone to ring! Frederick Web Promotions makes your phone ring.

Local Google Advertising from Frederick Web Promotions

240 397-9804

 

 

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Google Friend Connect To Go The Way of Yahoo Site Explorer

01.03.2012 local google advertising

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Promote Your Company Google+ Page Not Your Google+ Profile

15.02.2012 DIY SEO

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