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SEO Simplified Our guide to making online marketing work for you.

© 2012 Sweet Spot Marketing

www.SweetSpotMarketing.com

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Table of Contents

WHY IS SEO IMPORTANT ............................................................................................................. 3

FIRST PAGE RANKINGS BOOST TRAFFIC ......................................................................................... 3

ONLINE SEARCH IS A GROWING MARKET ........................................................................................ 4

HOW DOES SEO STACK UP? .......................................................................................................... 5

STEP 1) CONTENT OPTIMIZATION ................................................................................................... 6

Targeting Keywords ............................................................................................................................... 6

Content is King ....................................................................................................................................... 8

STEP 2) SITE INDEX AND HTML CODE CONSIDERATIONS ................................................................ 9

Page Titles & Meta Tags......................................................................................................................... 9

Image files and alt tags ........................................................................................................................ 10

301 redirects ........................................................................................................................................ 10

Robots.txt ............................................................................................................................................ 10

XML Site Map Development ................................................................................................................ 11

Canonicalize the URL ........................................................................................................................... 12

Developing a Custom 404 Page ........................................................................................................... 12

STEP 3) START BUILDING LINKS ................................................................................................... 13

Why Search Engines Measure Links ..................................................................................................... 13

SEO Experts Know Links Take You to the Top ...................................................................................... 13

Links are about Quality vs. Quantity .................................................................................................... 14

Link Building Helps Beyond SEO .......................................................................................................... 17

YOUR RESULTS........................................................................................................................... 18

TRAFFIC MONITORING AND OPTIMIZATION ..................................................................................... 18

PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS .................................................................................................... 19

We Do SEO the right way ..................................................................................................................... 19

We Do Online Marketing So You Don’t Have To.................................................................................. 19

SEO Costs are Different than PPC ........................................................................................................ 20

Improvement Depends on Implementation ........................................................................................ 21

Transparent SEO is Good SEO .............................................................................................................. 21

INDEX OF COMMON SEO TERMS.............................................................................................. 22


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Why is SEO Important

The primary goal for any search engine is to provide their searchers the best possible

results – based on any given keyword or phrase. No matter what search engine we

optimize for – Google, Yahoo! or Bing – each shares the same primary goal when they

display a list of results in their search pages – relevancy.

As a Search Engine Optimization Agency, we value the role of SEO in any size

marketing program. As experts in SEM, we make use of proven SEO techniques that

have helped our clients enjoy a greater success in both the search markets and the

competitive markets as well.

Sweet Spot Marketing wants your site to be a long-term success. Our SEO goals are to

grow your site traffic and improve keyword rankings for the long-term. SEO gains can be

short lived without building the proper foundation first. Sweet Spot Marketing takes a

two-phase approach when implementing an effective SEO Strategy.

First Page Rankings Boost Traffic

SEO traffic accounts for anywhere between 65-85 percent of all search traffic. People

today are more savvy searchers than they were as little as a few years ago. This means

more traffic is coming from refined searches and first page results.

Note: With 40% of search engine queries containing some local intent, most businesses

would do well to position themselves for search engine success in their markets.


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Online Search is a Growing Market Consumers have shifted to the internet as their primary resource for information. Internet

users are utilizing search engines to discover companies offering products and services

just like yours. We live in a world where your company’s critical first impression is being

found online. Online usage has been growing for over a decade and continues to grow

today.

Studies show that on average, 83% of all web traffic starts with a search engine. If

search engine rankings hold the largest potential for directing traffic to your website, then

your SEO budget should be larger than your marketing budget for any other advertising

mediums.


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How does SEO stack up? Well-informed marketers are spending more on internet ads every year. Recent data

from eMarketer.com gives no indication of online marketing slowing down. As an online

marketing company, we see companies shifting budget from traditional advertising more

and more because they can see and measure their online advertising success in terms

of their return on investment (ROI).

Online search is growing. Marketing budgets for most companies are switching from

traditional media to the internet. More people spending time online will equate to more

searches and more traffic potential for business.


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Three Steps to SEO Success

As stated before, Sweet Spot Marketing wants your site to be a long-term success. Our

SEO goals are to grow your site traffic, improve keyword rankings and succeed in the

long-term. Success in the long-term is an imperative. We know you won’t get the long-

term value you are seeking – unless we build from a solid foundation. It’s well known

that SEO gains can be short lived, but if we plan for the future we will see sustained

success and better ROI for the life of your SEO campaign.

Step 1) Content Optimization

Targeting Keywords The basis of any search engine algorithm is to rank sites based on keyword relevancy.

It’s a simple logic. By adding the keywords you want to rank for into the text content on

your site, it naturally becomes more relevant. Keyword rankings are triggered based on

the relationship of the content on your site to the search query.

The end goal of a body of well-written site content is to provide keyword-rich content for

better search rankings – while maintaining natural language, good composition, and

easy message delivery. In order to avoid “spammy” language, each page on your site

should be targeted for a select set of keyword phrases that relate to your product or

service.


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During this content strategy phase, it’s important to have an experienced SEO advisor

on-hand who can conduct keyword research and figure out how your budget, goals and

site will best fit together.

During the keyword research phase our SEO experts consider terms that will bring

targeted traffic to your website that converts easily into added revenue for your business.

While focusing on keywords for improved rankings, our content and site improvements

grow traffic for related keywords by way of the “Halo Effect.”


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Content is King If you have done your due diligence on SEO research, we can imagine that it didn't take

long before you found several SEO information sites advertising that “Content is King.”

This motto has been around since the dawn of SEO and, to this day, good, relevant

content is a major factor in SEO success.

Sweet Spot Marketing has refined the “Content is King” motto slightly by saying “original

content is king.”

Search engines love original content that engages and informs the readers!

Conversely, search engines hate to rank duplicate content sites because it devalues the

user experience to rank the same content twice. In fact, search engines have taken

several measures over the years to give original authors credit for their content.


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Step 2) Site Index and HTML Code Considerations

Site Index and HTML Code Considerations are the most common forms of SEO work

being done today. When most “SEO Experts” talk about their service offering, it’s often

implied they are referring to a very small set of techniques that involve merely tweaking

the site to improve keyword rankings. Unfortunately, a good SEO program goes much

further than these considerations. And, although any SEO Expert should be well-versed

in these elements and techniques, it’s advisable that anyone seeking SEO assistance to

shop for a full complement of SEO services.

In this particular process, Sweet Spot Marketing endeavors to remove site penalties and

clean up indexing issues that are hampering site performance. It’s important to

remember these are fundamental to a solid foundation, but this is the not entirety of the

groundwork that must be performed to ensure long-term SEO success and an

acceptable ROI.

Page Titles & Meta Tags Using the same Meta description tag for each page on a web site is not a search-engine-

friendly way to promote your site. Sites that have taken the time to write titles and Meta

tags properly stand a much greater chance of appearing over sites that have not taken

the time to optimize properly.


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Image files and alt tags A picture is worth a thousand words – unless you’re a search engine and you can’t see

what’s in the picture.

Using descriptive filenames and alt text will allow the search engines to have a greater

level of understand about the site page theme.

301 redirects Search engines will penalize (or split rankings) on duplicate sites thus affecting your

ranking potential. A 301 redirect is the most efficient and “search engine friendly”

strategy for redirecting traffic. Other redirect options hinder you search engine

performance because you are sending the wrong message to the search engine bots

(aka spiders).

Robots.txt All of the major search engines look for a robots.txt file as soon as their spiders arrive on

your site. It is a good idea to include this file in the root directory, as it can act as an

invitation into your site. By restricting search engine spiders from indexing selected

areas of your site, you can improve how search engines approach and index your site.


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XML Site Map Development Submitting a XML sitemap compliments the search engine’s normal methods of crawling

a web site. Helping a spider crawl your site in a more timely fashion is beneficial to both

you and the engines. Studies have shown a sitemap can dramatically improve the

number of pages a search engine chooses to index from your site.


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Canonicalize the URL Canonicalization is making sure that each page on your website is accessed in one

uniform way. For example, your home page may be accessed via the following URLs:

http://domain.com http://www.domain.com http://domain.com/index.php http://www.domain.com/index.php

https://domain.com https://www.domain.com https://domain.com/index.php https://www.domain.com/index.php

That’s 8 Different URLs for One Page!

We can consult with your Windows hosting company to fix this if possible. Or Sweet

Spot’s experts can fix this quickly with Apache hosted sites.

Developing a Custom 404 Page By neglecting your 404 page, you are missing a valuable traffic retention tool. User error

is an inevitable occurrence within all websites. When you control the error message you

don’t scare people away, instead you help them find their way back to you.

http://www.domain.com/

http://domain.com/index.php

http://www.domain.com/index.php

https://domain.com/

https://www.domain.com/

https://domain.com/index.php

https://www.domain.com/index.php


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Step 3) Start Building Links

Why Search Engines Measure Links Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin publicly pioneered the use of link

measurement as an indicator of search relevance when they developed the Google

search engine. To illustrate the meaning and significance, try to think of external sites

that link to your site as positive “votes” toward your content and character. The more

votes your site gets, the more search engines view your site as a valuable resource

worth ranking.

As the theory goes, by measuring not only the keyword relevance on a page, but also

the number of “votes” each page had, you could accurately determine which pages were

considered by web users to be most valuable (or relevant) for the given search terms.

Furthermore, links from web pages with high Page Rankings would be more valuable

(considered more authoritative and reliable) than links from those with low Page

Rankings.

Over the years, all of the major search engines adopted the link-based ranking model

with some stylistic variation from engine to engine. The technology, quality and

“intelligence” of the various search algorithms continually evolve in an effort to improve

the quality of returned search results.

SEO Experts Know Links Take You to the Top

The results of a 2009 survey from the Top 100 SEO Professionals in the world

highlighted exactly how important links are. Out of the top 5 ranking factors, 4 are related

to building links to your websites pages.


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Links are about Quality vs. Quantity Link building is not simply about soliciting a higher number of links than your

competition. The quality of the links attained for your website is extremely important as

well.

At Sweet Spot, we have the ability to increase traffic to your site via blogging, submitting

press releases, publishing articles and directory submission links. Not only do these link-

building efforts provide additional avenues for people to navigate to your site, but they

also give the site a growing authority for search engine rankings because of the pass

along anchor text values and overall Page Rank to your site.


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Types of Links

Sweet Spot Marketing will analyze your existing link profile to develop the best link

building campaign for your site. We will also compare it to the identified competition in

your market to determine what type of campaign best suits your needs in the competitive

marketplace.

Submit your site to Directories

Submit your site to related Sites

Build Social Networking Profiles & Links

Post Blog Articles

Send Press Releases

Submit Articles to Online Article Resource Sites


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Link Building Helps Beyond SEO

As we’ve just discussed, many link building efforts in the SEO world are done to improve

a site’s search engine rankings: Links operate as votes, as trust, as rank-building

influencers. There are, however, other reasons to build links as well.

Gaining Referring Site Traffic:

Oddly enough, search engine spiders aren’t the only ones that see links to your site.

Web users visiting sites can and, hopefully do, click on those links, generating direct

traffic to you. Once again, though, it’s worth your while to focus on quality links from

relevant pages fist and expand out your link building efforts as your SEO budget grows.

Visibility, Branding & Influence:

What happens when someone looks online for information about your products and

services and they see not only links to your site, but comments about you in every

prominent blog on the subject? You become an authority in the field. By participating in

the community in your market and building content worthy of links and discussion within

the community, you gain visibility, brand awareness and influence.

Pro-active Reputation Management Benefits

Social networking is a pro-active approach to online reputation management. Taking the

good with the bad is part of the deal. If you approach dissatisfied customers as an

opportunity – and not a problem – you can show the rest of the world how much you

care about your customers.

Most importantly, you always want someone with an issue or a complaint to bring that

issue to forum on a site you control. When people don’t feel like they have a voice or an

opportunity to connect with someone in the company, they often turn to sites like

RipOffReport.com. These third-party complaint sites can easily and quickly show up in

search results for your brand – and you have no control over it. If you attempt a rebuttal,

you may be adding more fuel to the fire and helping improving the slanderous search

results rankings.

Many companies have spent thousands of dollars in legal fees trying to get “rip off” sites

to pull down negative remarks to no avail. Needless to say, being proactive is always

best approach when it comes to online reputation management!


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Your Results

Traffic Monitoring and Optimization Sweet Spot Marketing uses Google Analytics to monitor site traffic. With every customer,

we add the Google Analytics code to their site and begin to analyze the data. This traffic

data shows SEO progress and gives us the ability to optimize our efforts. Sweet Spot

Marketing provides login access to any client who wishes to view their site data in real

time.

By implementing analytics and webmaster tools on a website, we can begin to learn

what keywords are producing results while exploring new avenues to increase traffic. If

you already have Analytics software tracking the visitors on your site, this data will serve

as a good benchmark for us to measure search engine improvements.


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Performance Expectations

We Do SEO the right way When it comes to SEO, making cookie cutter promises or guarantees is not the right

approach. We aim for top rankings just like everyone else, but we set realistic short-term

and long-term goals based on our experience and your specific situation.

Think about it this way, Google would have to display rankings horizontally to match the

amount of #1 ranking claims that are being inferred by some SEO companies. The

reality of the situation is some keywords are more challenging than others.

With Google map adjustments, shopping links, image links, video links, social network

rankings, news rankings, and all the unforeseen changes Google will make in the future,

be cautious of any company that makes SEO guarantees. It’s simply impossible to

substantiate results over a given period of time as Google makes over 400 algorithm

changes a year. Sweet Spot Marketing prides itself on giving you honest advice, and

tailoring an SEO campaign to work with your needs and budget.

We Do Online Marketing So You Don’t Have To

Sweet Spot keeps up-to-speed with latest online changes so you don’t have to. For

instance, Google reported over 400 algorithm changes in 2009. That is more than one a

day! Fortunately, the fundamentals of SEO have not changed significantly over the

years.

Two major algorithm changes are the Google ‘Panda and Penguin update in 2012.

Knowing the details about this update and how it affected keyword rankings for long-tail

keywords is important when it comes to reacting to your own Analytics data. Having a

company like Sweet Spot on your side takes care of all this for you.


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SEO Costs are Different than PPC Both SEO rankings and pay-per-click (PPC) ads exist on the same search results page,

but are totally independent of each other. Neither is better nor worse, in fact running a

PPC campaign provides great keyword data that we can use to help optimize the site.

As you can see in the chart below, your PPC budget generally returns a consistent ROI

month after month with the same budget.

SEO is different, in that your initial costs continue to carry results month after month.

This means that ROI is more difficult to directly measure, but with established site

processes and a growing domain authority via link growth, your cost to maintain rankings

becomes lower.

In the end, your SEO budget will generate a higher long-term return on investment (ROI)

because the SEO dollars spent now will last for the life of the site.


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Improvement Depends on Implementation

Our SEO recommendations mean very little unless they can be implemented within your

site and budget. In order for Sweet Spot Marketing to fully develop the best integrated

SEO approach – and optimize your site – it’s helpful to know what your marketing

budget is and how we might work with any internal IT and/or web developers you have

on staff.

For some clients, major site changes are no problem, as they are already looking to

redesign their site as part of the optimization. For others, too much time and money has

already been poured into the site and it would be costly to unravel what has already

been done.

Sweet Spot Marketing’s SEO experts are ready and able to approach any situation.

When you share your site’s history and any technical restrictions early on, we can

expedite our marketing approach to get you the best return on investment.

Transparent SEO is Good SEO

Sweet Spot Marketing champions client education and SEO understanding. We feel that

the more our clients know and understand how SEO works, the more they come on-

board with what we can accomplish. This means when it comes time to optimize our

strategy, those involved will already be on-board.

We never hide anything or claim to have proprietary knowledge we can’t share with you.

Our results are reported monthly in a detailed and transparent report that will break

down traffic and keyword data. A unique aspect of our monthly reporting is that it grows

with the campaign. Reports that provide trends over time help us evaluate performance.

When it comes to SEO and recommendations for the future, you are better off looking at

long-term trends, so don’t settle for a messy 30-day spreadsheet as your monthly SEO

report.


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Index of Common SEO Terms 301 Redirect - Method of redirecting an old webpage to a new location. More simply, to display another web page for the web address that you are trying to visit. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the move is permanent (as opposed to temporary) and gives full domain authority to the new other URL. 404 error - File not found. The server was unable to locate the URL. Above the Fold - A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. Alt Tag - An HTML attribute typically used within the IMG tag to provide alternate text when images cannot be displayed. Analytics - Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site. Anchor Tag - An HTML tag that allows you to create a link to another document or web page or to a bookmark within the current web page. Authority - The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity, site age, traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content. Backlink - Links originating from one website and pointing to another website or web page. Blog "Web Log". An online journal of sorts. Bot - Programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons (to index web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) aka web robots, web crawlers, internet bots, and spiders.

http://www.seobook.com/glossary/#404


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Cache - Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you search the web, you are not actively searching the whole web, but are searching files in the search engine index. Some search engines provide links to cached versions of pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting from cached copies of pages.

Cloaking - Showing a different web page to a search engine spider than what is normally seen. Method typically used by spammers. CMS - Content Management System. Tool used to help make it easy to update and add information to a website. Conversion - Web traffic that fulfills a pre-established goal, such as purchasing of a specific product or filling out a registration form, etc. CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. A language used to describe how a given page or web site will look. Used to control font styles, graphical layouts, color, etc. CTR - Click Through Rate. Standard method of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. Calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of times the ad was shown. DMOZ - The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is primarily run by volunteer editors. Duplicate Content - Content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature. Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content. Dynamic Website - A website whose content is not fixed. What is shown on a page is based on user-selected activities and/or programmatically driven. Flash - Vector graphics-based animation software which makes it easier to make websites look rich and interactive in nature. Search engines tend to struggle indexing and ranking flash websites because flash typically contains so little relevant content. Google PageRank


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- Sometime called “PR”, is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. .htaccess - Apache directory-level configuration file which can be used to password protect or redirect files. Keywords - Words that are used by search engines to determine the topic of a given web page. Keyword Density - How often a keyword or keyword phrase is used on a given web page. Landing Page - A content-rich web page geared around a particular topic, product or conversion goal. Typically a main navigation item of a website. Meta Tags - Web page specific, descriptive information that helps a search engine identify the purpose and topic of a given web page. Common meta data include a web page's description and keyword listing. No follow - Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link authority. Commonly used on sites with user generated content, like in blog comments. Organic Results - Search results in a search engine that are not paid advertisements. The results that come up naturally based on their indexing within a search engine. Organic search results are good. We all want to come up on top for organic searches using keywords we are optimized for. Paid Directory Links - Major search engines like Google automatically assign more value to sites that have backlinks from sites like Business.com and Best of the web. Paid Link Building - Websites who are willing to link back to your site for a fee in order to boost your rankings/weight in the search engines. See link building. Reciprocal Link - The practice of placing a link from website A to website B strictly because website B is linking to website A. Robots.txt - A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl.

http://www.ajazi.com/link-building.cfm

http://www.seobook.com/glossary/#robots-txt


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ROI - Return on Investment is a measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar. Search Engine - Web site whose function is to help users find web pages on any given searched topic. SEM - Search Engine Marketing. The act of marketing a website via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities. SEO - Search Engine Optimization. The act of altering a web site so that it does well in organic listings of search engines. SERP - Search Engine Results Page. The listing of web pages that a search engine shows a user once they've entered a search value. Site Map - Page which can be used to help give search engines a secondary route to navigate through your site. Spider - Programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons (to index web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) aka web robots, web crawlers, bots, and internet bots. Static Website - A website or web page whose content is fixed (does not change or has to be manually changed). Title Tag - A Meta data element that determines the actual "title" of a given webpage. The title is what shows up in the top bar of your browser. It is also the hyperlink that shows in search engine results listings. URL - Uniform Resource Locator. Or, more commonly, a web address. W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where web standards and guidelines are developed.

http://www.seobook.com/glossary/#site-map

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