I recently posted an article about the importance of properly naming your website and webpage headlines as well as adding in the right (and the right amount of) keywords. With the economy being what it is, many people will be starting up new online businesses soon. In order to help with their efforts, I decided to write up a quick entry on the importance of creating an SEO friendly business name.

A substantial amount of searches performed online are direct brand searches. In other words, people are searching for companies by name. In order to make sure that your business name isn’t drowned out in the rankings, be sure to follow some simple rules:

Get some hired help. I highly recommend hiring a SEO agency, marketing firm or SEO consultant to think of something for you. But if you insist on doing it yourself…

Make sure that your business name does NOT contain any popular or highly competitive keywords. A name like “Jill’s Discount Toys” is more likely to get ranked poorly if “discount toys” is a hot keyword, even if a potential consumer searches for Jill’s company by name. The reason: Because if “discount toys” is a competitive keyword then everyone is going to use it.

Think about acronyms. Can your business name easily be shortened into initials? Think IBM, MRI, AIG or UNH. All of these are businesses with names that the general public thought would be easier to shorten to a set of initials, and therefore search for them that way. The problem is that there’s always more than one business out there with the same acronym and the likelihood of not being drowned out (especially as a small and brand new business) by those other guys is pretty slim. I’ll give an example: Let’s say your business name is the “Salvatore Engineering Operation”. It’s very easy for the general population to search for your business as SEO… well we all know what that is going to bring up and it’s not Salvatore Engineering Operation. So be careful when advertising and putting your name out there.

Be memorable. Easier said than done, I know. Using a clever name, logo or tagline can help people remember your name better. People also remember colorful marketing, unusual color schemes and well organized and branded company logos/names. When people can make an association between your name and something clever, it is easier for them to retrieve that information from the back of their minds. This will also help to prevent people from turning your business name into an acronym.

A common scenario: “Uh, I know it started with an “S”… “S-S-Something” Engineering Operation… oh well, I’ll just Google SEO.) They may also decide to search for the only words they remember: “Engineering Operation.” These two very general keywords will bring up all kinds of companies, none of which are probably yours.

Don’t forget to think locally. If you think your name may be turned into a set of initials, (and you’re absolutely stuck on naming yourself that) then think about putting your state, providence, country or whatever place you feel necessary into your name. “SEO of Maine” or “Napa Valley SEO” may get your business name a little closer to the first page of search results – although it’s still unlikely in the case of “SEO”.

Don’t spend your SEO budget unwisely. You need a place in the rankings, but your new company name just isn’t raking in the hits. So you start to think about PPC and Sponsored Ads. The problem with PPC ads when your company name consists of competitive keywords or ellipses, is that you are going to illicit a lot of poor quality clicks. In other words, anyone searching for an SEO company may click on your PPC ad, but they won’t help to generate an income since your SEO is an engineering company. Without the right name those PPC ads are just costing you money.

Do your research. Get a list of ideas together for your company name and start searching for them online. Also do some searches for abbreviations, possible misspellings, partial names and any other possible ways that a searcher can screw up those business names you’ve thought up. You can even try “reverse engineering” the process by looking up the least popular keywords you can find and building your company name from those. Above all be flexible. Don’t get stuck on one name and be stubborn about it. If it won’t work, then it won’t work – end of story.

Popularity: 21%

There are two kinds of titles that you should be thinking about: Your web page title and your Headline Title.  They can be separate or one in the same, depending on what kind of website/blog you have.  Both can put you at the top of a search engine list if done right.  

Website and Web Page Titles
Your website title is one of the first things that major search engines look for when ranking your page. When your title and description accurately reflect your content, (which should also be fabulous,) it drastically improves the chances that your web page rank will rise like fresh baked blueberry muffins. That’s not enough though. You’ll also need a website title that’s noticeable and makes people want to know more and click through to your site.

Think local. If your business is in London, make a specific appeal to London and the surrounding area. People all over the world will still want to view your website for its valuable information. However, it makes good business sense to make a local appeal too since people are more comfortable making purchases from companies that are close by.

List your business name and some important keywords in your title. Small and New businesses list keywords first. Larger and well known businesses can list their name before the keywords. i.e.: A small business may write: Best gourmet coffee in Maine at Schmoe’s Joe. While a larger company may say: Schmoe’s Joe: Best gourmet coffee in Maine.

For every page on your website, use a different tagline with keywords that you know people will look for. i.e.: Schmoe’s Joe: About Our Gourmet Coffee Company, Schmoe’s Joe: Buy Gourmet Coffee Online, Schmoe’s Joe: Gourmet Coffee Accessories.

Website titles should be as short as possible. Don’t try to squeeze ten keywords in to one headline. You are more likely to get better results with one or two quality keywords than you will with half a dozen of them. This is mostly due to the fact that web surfers are looking for instant information. They don’t typically read that much into a headline anyway. In order to get lots of quality keywords associated with your site, use the method above and put a different keyword in the title of every page.

Content, Blog and Article Headlines
According to John Caples, author of “Tested Advertising Methods,” There are three major types of titles that attract the most clicks:

1) News Headlines:
It is human nature to seek out information and find out what is happening in their world. News headlines offer objective facts which make readers feel more knowledgeable and in control of their environment. Examples are: “Celebrity Searches Lead to Malware” “New Remote Application Available for iPhone and iPod” and “Buy New Wii at Discount Stores”

2) Curious Monkey:
Everyone has a little curious monkey inside their head distracting them from the task at hand and telling them to click on the video of the skateboarding dog. Headlines like “Cat Declared Hero” “$80M Disaster” or “Bubble Boy Lives!” can get people’s attention pretty quickly.

3) Self Interests:
This is the most effective since readers are interested in things and ideas that they will personally benefit from. It appeals to a need, a want or an ego. For instance: “Learn Spanish in Two Weeks” “Retire Ten Years Early” or “Affordable Mansions”

When appealing to the “self-interest” spectrum, beware of overuse. Consumers and web surfers have become fairly desensitized to marketing and advertising on the internet, if not extremely wary and cynical. Over-sell it and they may think you’re a scam operation. There needs to exist a delicate balance between a quality product and an intelligent, subtle yet strong appeal to their ego and desire. It all comes down to finding what kind of tone your demographic responds to. Do they want something edgy and fresh, subtle and intelligent, or maybe they are more likely to click on a headline that is funny and bizzare

Remember, you don’t have to be #1 on the search engine’s list to get the most clicks.  It’s better to have a few high quality keywords and an appealing headline than a title that is too vague or contains too much information.

Popularity: 30%

One thing I have noticed lately is that surfers are becoming far more aware of geo-location based searches. The explosion in user education which has happened thanks mainly to Google has trained users into searching for location specific everyday items. “Pizzas near me”, “New York restaurants” etc.

My comments in this post relate specifically to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid search campaigns related to local search, i will be posting a seperate and more in depth article on organic local search.

Now, the problem with the vast majority of search agencies is that very few have taken their clients down the local search path and still build search campaigns specifically around the ultra high volume and cost keywords, ultimately missing the local opportunity. Some clients of course get more use out of localised campaigns than others. Restaurants, Doctors, YMCA’s of course should be focusing on their specific locations, however massive, broad reaching businesses such as Yellow Pages, Hotel networks and other businesses which span massive numbers of locations still seem to be showing generic advertising copy and delivering users to the wrong content.

I guess what I am trying to say is that – Local search is here and its growing much faster than the general search landscape. Users want and expect completely localised results, tailored to their location and giving them everything they are looking for on the FIRST PAGE after clicking a link. Not browsing through a few different post landing pages to find what they want. It’s time to start thinking locally and about how you or your clients can leverage this massive opportunity.

On average, every local search campaign we run saves our clients 20% on the cost of their clicks. That’s 20% more clicks for simply optimising the hell out of their content and properly structuring search campaigns.

There will be a series of upcoming articles and guides on local search and the opportunities which exist within the space. So stay tuned!

Popularity: 53%

Google’s products are always evolving, AdWords, Gmail, Maps are hardly the same from one week to the next. So it was no surprise this week, when Google unleashed a whole bunch of new features on Google Maps.

Local search is changing and Google and Yahoo have started to deliver a new suite of products, specifically designed to give people results, richly populated with local data, photos, reviews and anything else which has a geographical tag associated with it.

Explore this area - Google maps starts to deliver user generated content

Let’s look at the first major change, the left hand navigation column, now has a little snippet of text which says “Explore this area” Below that text is now a selection of images from that location. Big deal you may think, but look a little closer and click on the explore this area link.

Let’s do some sample searches and see what comes up. Go to Maps.Google.com and try searching for “Yellowstone” (Or simply click on the Yellowstone link to go right there)

Ok, so we have the map open and we can see Yellowstone, old faithful and everything else within the area. Now, let’s click on “Explore this area” and really see what this feature does. You should see some images appear, on the main map interface that look something like this picture below.

The beautiful thing about this, is that this content is from the general public, peoples personal experiences with the area you are looking at. Not just some salesperson, trying to convince you about how great the holiday will be. You can now explore photos, videos, reviews and get a much more immersed within the area, all through the use of Google Maps.

Let’s do a little exploring on this Yellowstone map we have open, i clicked on one of the images of the world famous geyser known as “old faithful” and bang what’s this, its a youtube video somebody took of old faithful playing within Google maps.

I’m not going to go through the interface image by image for you, i suggest just opening up Google Maps, searching for something that you know well, clicking explore and then seeing the quality of content you can find.

I Expect that the amount of content and the quality of it is only going to increase exponentially as people start to tag their holiday snaps with geographical data, so lookout for new refinements to this feature.

Maps gets real - Google maps now featuring real estate listings.

Ok, so we have just seen the new explore this area feature and all that comes along with it but did you think they would stop there?

Every real estate site that i use to look for houses (I am currently looking to buy so i visit them frequently) seems to use Google Maps to show me, exactly where the house is. So, it seems only logical for Google to do the opposite and start to integrate real estate listings directly into Maps.

The biggest problem i have when searching through real estate sites, is the fact that their search is, well, extremely bad and outdated. I dont want to search by price range or number of bedrooms, i would prefer to search by location and then choose from the houses i like, all the while keeping in mind which streets the house is on and how far it is from work.

Let’s do an example real estate search, to do this you will need to click on “show search options” on the right hand side of your maps search box, then from the dropdown choose real estate. Now do a search for your favourite location and you are browsing real estate listings with photos and descriptions.

The implications of this little addition are huge for the real estate industry. Google could effectively, allow people to sell their house, directly through Adwords and cut out the middleman real estate site. I’m not going to go into detail about my thoughts on that in this article as i am preparing a seperate, more in-depth commentary about that topic. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, i suggest keeping an eye out for these new little icons that popup from time to time on Google Maps and play with them as much as possible.

Popularity: 50%

Google is in the middle of a very quiet revolution, changing the search results right before your very eyes, introducing a new type of search which has been dubbed “universal search” by most, others call it blended search. Whatever you call it, its changing the way that SEO professionals optimize website content.

Universal search brings together components of web, book, blog, video, news and many more different types of search onto the one results page, all blended seamlessly so that the average Joe doesn’t know the difference between one or the other, they simply get results tailored to their search query from various different sources.

The interesting question facing marketers, is how to take advantage of these new elements, which feature prominently within SERPS? Do you focus your time on optimizing video content, tagging images, writing a blog, publishing ebooks?!?

Need an example of universal search? Try searching Google.com for “los angeles bars” and this is what you will see:

Universal Search Example:

Ok, so we now know what universal search optimization can cover, basically any kind of web content so here is my guide to help priotize your online content efforts, in order of easiest to hardest.

1. Tagging your images: This is a no brainer and one of the easiest ways to start to get some additional traffic from the search engines. Tagging all images contained on your website with the correct alt text and description fields, gives you the opportunity to basically show a banner ad at the very top of a search result, if Google deems your image to be highly relevant.
2. Optimizing video content: Make your video useful or informational (Don’t waste users time), tag your video with popular terms which relate to the content, keep the video short and to the point, put your logo on the video and always ensure that you name your video so that it is relevant to the content and the keywords associated with it. Another great tip is to always include your videos in a “video sitemap” so that the search engines can find it all and finally use html to describe the contents of your video because search engines still love HTML best!
3. News content: If Google or Yahoo or any other news aggregators, truly think your site is newsworthy, they will generally add you to their index on their own, however for the majority of us it’s a matter of writing content, building up a reasonable level of quality and then submitting for approval. Once approved, news based search results can deliver lots of relevant traffic and the same old rules apply, write good quality, keyword rich, feature articles and make them worthwhile for users to read.
4. Local search: Getting listed within local search results can be as simple as adding your website to the local business ads section index within your adwords account, the reason that i put this as #4 was because you generally have to pay for the listing on a per click basis. However Google will also give you that one, free, map based link if you claim ownership of your business address, via a verification process. Click here for more information on Local business ads
5. Book search: Now this is a tougher one, simply because you have to take the time to write a book! It’s not as easy as it sounds but if you have the time, write a book on something you are truly passionate about, something you have a strong opinion on and then publish it as a PDF. Do your research and find popular phrases, using tools like wordtracker or keyword elite and featuring these phrases heavily within your original content. Once you have written your book, published it, it looks all pretty. Register it for a Google book ID and you are done, if people are searching for phrases which are highly relevant to your publication, there is a good change your book will be shown.

If you currently use a third party search agency to optimize your website, make sure you ask them what they are doing for your universal optimization, be proactive and findout their guidelines and strategies and ask questions about where they think the future is heading and get in before your competition does.

Those tips above are useful, but the most important thing to remember when optimizing your search marketing, is to try and deliver unique, meaningful content to users. Google and Yahoo both love to deliver the freshest, most useful webpage’s to their users, so if you write it (and optimize it properly) they will come.

Popularity: 56%