Erich Stauffer

Tag: SEO

  • My SEO Strategy

    SEO - search engine optimization mindmap on napkin with cup of coffee
    SEO – search engine optimization mindmap on napkin with cup of coffee

    Occasionally I get questions from clients and post my answers publicly here. This simple question, “What are your ideas for SEO,” prompted me to write this blog post so I could help other people in addition to my client.

    What is SEO?

    While the letters are an abbreviation for “search engine optimization”, there are many definitions of what this means. To simplify it for this blog post, I’m going to divide it into two distinct terms:

    1. On-Page Optimization – what you do on the website to attract search engines.
    2. In-Bound Marketing – what you do off the website to attract search engines.

    On-Page Optimization

    On-page optimization involves making sure the structure, meta information, and schema information is optimized for the site. Examples include using only one H1 tag, the page title, and meta description contain your primary keyword.

    In-Bound Marketing

    In-bound marketing involves getting backlinks to your website or page from relevant sources in a variety of different ways. Examples include asking a relevant directory or blog author to post a link back to a relevant page on your website.

    How Should I Get Started?

    The ‘low hanging fruit’ is to do a site audit to determine the state of your HTML tags, meta tags, and site schemas. After that, move on to backlinking to your existing content from your existing social media and then build out from there.

    Proper HTML Tag Structure

    “HTML” stands for hypertext markup language and is simply plain text that when rendered in a web browser, changes the look of the text it’s surrounding. It has markup tags for both heading and style:

    1. H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 are all heading tags. “H1” should only exist once per page.
    2. Strong and Bold (b) are examples of style tags that search engines may use to know what is important.

    By using the keywords you want to rank for in the heading and strong/bold tags, you’re letting the search engines know that this page or website is about those keywords and so they should pay attention to them.

    Proper Meta Tag Structure

    There are many different types of meta tags, but we’ll focus on these two: Title and Description:

    1. Title: this is what displays in the top of the web browser, not necessarily what is shown on the page.
    2. Description: this is the short paragraph that displays under the title in search results.

    Both the Title and Description tags should contain your keywords, but they should be readable to the user, not just a list of keywords. And in case you’re wondering, the “Keywords” meta tag is now largely ignored by search engines.

    Proper Site Schema Structure

    Site schema is information that makes it easier for search engines to read the information on your web pages so they can serve relevant results to users. There are three main kinds of site schema: Schema.org, Facebook Open Graph, and Twitter Cards:

    1. Schema.org: a collaboration between Google, Bing, Yahoo! to standardize structured markup.
    2. Facebook Open Graph: integrates your website with Facebook by allowing it to become a “graph” object.
    3. Twitter Cards: allows photos and videos to be displayed as Tweets using data from your website.

    Don’t worry if this is overwhelming. Most modern website templates contain SEO-optimized HTML tags, will prompt you for title and description tags, and will already contain the proper site schema structure.

    How Do I Know What Keywords to Use?

    All of SEO is predicated on the notion that you know what problem you’re trying to solve. Usually that problem is, “I want to rank for X” where X is the keyword they most associate with their business or the highest potential for income.

    If you don’t know what keyword(s) to go after, then the first step is to do keyword research. There are several ways to do this such as by using Google’s Keyword Planner Tool (part of Google Adwords) or by using an autocomplete tool like Ubersuggest.

    1. https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
    2. https://ubersuggest.io/

    How Do I Get More Backlinks?

    The best way to get more backlinks is to create more content. The best kind of content is the kind that answers people’s questions or is entertaining (i.e. is valuable to the reader). Seth Godin calls this type of content, “remarkable”.

    Once you have created content, you now have something to link back to from social media or relevant directories. If you’ve solved a problem for someone in a forum, you can legitimately link back to that post without fearing spam complaints because you’re being helpful.

    How Do I Know What Questions People Have?

    The first place to look is in your own email inbox or customer support portal. What questions do you get from your current or prospective clients? Is there a response you find yourself writing about over and over? Other places include:

    1. Quora: this is literally a website full of questions.  Quora is like a more respectable Yahoo! Answers.
    2. Forums: online forums can be found by searching for your keyword + “forum”. Look for the sticky posts.
    3. Buzzsumo: this site shows you the most popular articles about a given topic using social shares as it’s metric.

    Once you know what keywords you’re trying to rank for, what questions people have about those keywords, and your site structure has been optimized for SEO, it’s now time to create SEO-optimized content to share.

    How Do I Create SEO-Optimized Content?

    SEO-optimized content is predicated on using a site that is SEO-optimized on-page (SEE “On-Page Optimization” section above). It’s key components are that the keyword is used in the title and the content is valuable.

    • Keyword is used in title: make sure the primary keyword is used organically in the title of the page or post
    • Content is valuable: make sure the content answers a question someone has or provides entertainment

    If you offer a service, explain how someone could solve the problem themselves. Be as detailed as possible. Show every step along the way. It will show how knowledgeable you are to those who want to pay and help those who don’t.

    What is My SEO Strategy?

    My strategy is to ensure the site has been SEO-optimized on-site, ensure all content has been backlinked to from social media at least once, and then begin creating new SEO-optimzed content to share on social media.

    Only once I have done those 3 things will I begin the long courtship with other websites, directories, and forums to get backlinks to the content I’ve already created. To adapt an Albert Einstein quote:

    Try not to become a [site] of success , but rather try to become a [site] of value.”

    Who is Erich Stauffer?

    I’ve been writing about SEO since 2009. A lot has changed over the years, but some things have not. Valuable content that answers the questions of the reader is good for both search engine results and the customer.

    If you’re interested in hiring me to consult with you about your SEO strategies, packages start at $200 per session for one-on-one SEO advice on your specific situation. I look forward to helping you with your business.

  • SEO Metric: Time to First Conversion

    This is a SEO case study on “Time to First Conversion”, which involves tracking how long it takes to reach the first conversion after the SEO campaign begins. In this case study, the conversion was tracked as a email web form submission to a website. In Google Analytics, this might be setup as a goal, but in this case, it was tracked by the actual email message.

    Handyman Escondido

    Handyman Escondido was launched on May 9, 2013 and by July 22 had its first web conversion. 3 days later on July 25 it had it’s second conversion. It took 2 months and 13 days to get the first conversion.

    SEO firms can’t promise or guarantee Google rankings, but they typically state that results will come in approximately 3 months. In this case, it was true, but here’s the thing: only on-page SEO was done to this site. There was no inbound marketing, no backlinks, no blog posts, no social media marketing, no Google Adwords.

    And how many pages do you think this site has? 1. This site has one page, it’s home page. It reads like a Dan Kennedy sales letter without the testimonials, but hey, the information is all there. This site got 2 conversions in 3 months from it’s domain name and on-page SEO alone.

    It currently ranks #6 for the keyword term “handyman escondido” and #16 for “escondido handyman”. However, the handyman is not located in Escondido, California. He’s located in North County San Diego, California. So how does he rank for “North County San Diego, California Handyman”? #21. How’s that for no off-page SEO?

  • Top Posts and Keywords for December 2012

    In this 714th post, I discuss my top content, keywords, and income for this website.

    Ecclesiastes 3:5 says that there is, “A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away (NLT).” Since 2007 I have been purchasing domains for speculation or use, but lately I have been condensing the total number of domains I own. Most of the time I roll them into this blog, but this led to a big pile of disjointed posts that had no real, central meaning. I recently spent a day consolidating the post categories down to 9 main categories + 1 called “Tweets” and then redesigned the homepage to showcase the last 3 posts with a thumbnail + the most popular posts + the last 5 posts from the 9 main categories. This is how I overcame the problem. Looking back, the solution seems simple, but there was a lot of work in eliminating and combining categories for hundreds of posts + the custom programming of the home page to do what it’s doing “automatically”.

    Here is a List of Former Domains Included in ErichStauffer.com:

    • mapstrings.com
    • managingactions.com
    • lostpost.net
    • professionaltechnologyconsulting.com
    • geekhand.com
    • watershawl.com
    • telablue.com
    • yourscor.com
    • white-roof.com

    Audience Overview

    The spike in traffic you see at the left edge of the image above is from combining all posts from the old Watershawl site into this blog. As you can see, the traffic didn’t continue and tapered off, despite leaving the posts in place. Total visits were 2,268 with 2,077 being unique. There were 3,504 pageviews with 1.54 pages per visit. The bounce rate was 75.13%, which is slightly higher than last month. Most people used Chrome (25.5%) followed by Internet Explorer (22.5%), Firefox (20.9%), and Safari (18.5%). Most visits were from New York City (166) followed by Fishers, Indiana (35), San Francisco (33), Chicago (26) and Indianapolis (25). Internet Explorer being topped by Chrome means that the addition of new technical content on mobile devices and query strings has attracted a more technical crowd compared to last month.

    Top 10 Content

    The three posts to fall out of the top ten were Arnart’s Erich Stauffer Fake Hummels (45), Collegeclub.com Email (49), and My CEO Heroes (6).

    Top 10 Keywords

    VINTAGE ARNART CERAMIC FIGURINE- BOY PLAYING BANJO BY ERICH STAUFFER

    • erich stauffer – 55 visits
    • collegeclub.com – 39 visits
    • forward text messages to email – 22 visits
    • college club website – 13 visits
    • erich stauffer figurines – 13 visits
    • arnart imports – 12 visits
    • erich stauffer collectibles – 11 visits
    • collegeclub email – 10 visits
    • erich stauffer figurine prices – 10 visits
    • erich stauffer 8515 – 9 visits

    Despite the new, technical content from Watershawl.com, the only change in the top keywords was the addition of “forward text messages to email.”

    Top 10 Sources

    Erich Stauffer on Twitter

    • google.com – 102 visits
    • t.co – 38 visits
    • m.facebook.com – 10 visits
    • google.co.uk – 7 visits
    • facebook.com – 6 visits
    • watershawl.com – 6 visits
    • google.com.br – 5 visits
    • iphoneunity.com – 5 visits
    • google.de – 4 visits
    • google.pl – 4 visits

    I was pleased to see Twitter (t.co) in the mix this time and I am sure this has mostly to do with my testing of the Tweetily plugin to automatically and randomly send links to old WordPress posts.

    Income Stats

    Amazon Associates Affiliate Program: 82 Items Ordered – 78 Items Shipped – $150 Advertising Fees
    Google Adsense: $127 Estimate

  • Top Posts and Keywords for November 2012

    In this 667th post, I discuss my top content, keywords, and income for this website.

    Occasionally I’ll do an analysis of my blog content and share it out for others to learn from what I’m doing. Dukeo does this with his monthly blogging stats so I’m thinking about doing it more often, maybe monthly. We’ll see. Here is my attempt at a monthly blog statistics analysis based on data from Google Analytics, Amazon Associates, and Google Adsense.

    The spike in traffic you see at the right edge of the image below is from combining all posts from the old Watershawl site into this. Watershawl was averaging over 5000 unique visitors a month with two posts, “Syncing Outlook Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks with Android Using Gmail” and “How to Auto-Forward Text Messages to Email in Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, and the iPhone” getting around 2000 unique visitors each. No doubt these will be the top 2 posts next month. Interestingly, they were originally written for my Geek Hand site, but were folded into Watershawl earlier this year so this is actually their second move. I’ve got a redirection plugin up on Watershawl to redirect traffic to Erich Stauffer for now.

    Total visits was 1,544 with 1,417 being unique. There were 2,383 pageviews with 1.54 pages per visit. The bounce rate was 74.61%, which is really high. Most people used Internet Explorer (28%) followed by Chrome (24%), Safari (19.5%), Firefox (18%). Most visits were from the United States with most visitors being from California (128) followed by New York (94), Florida (72), Illinois (61), and Texas (58). Indiana had 38 for comparison. Judging by the use of Internet Explorer, the high content of Florida visitors, and the penchant for Erich Stauffer figurines, I’d say I have an older visitor base that is not interested in what I want to talk about most of the time (more on that later).

    Top 10 Content

    Of my Top Posts of 2011, the only one to fall out of the top 10 is “How to Delete a Digg Submission“. Regardless of how much I try to write about business, technology, and entrepreneurship, “the organism will do whatever it pleases.” My response to that in the past has been to ‘write more of what people are already looking at’ and sometimes I end up creating an entirely new site out of my most popular content, as I wrote about in Analyzing Actions in September of 2009. One post on Youtube Query String Parameters was turned into an entire site, which was later sold for $145. I did the same thing with the How to Stay Alert and Focused post. I’ve since made a new ‘query strings’-type site called Map Strings that gets most of it’s traffic from How To Run Google Maps On the Kindle Fire EDIT: moved the site here starting on 1/6/2013.

    Top 10 Keywords

    • erich stauffer (68)
    • collegeclub.com (31)
    • erich stauffer figurines (17)
    • what happened to collegeclub (14)
    • eric stauffer figurines (12)
    • erich stauffer figurine prices (11)
    • mexican cat (11)
    • arnart porcelain marks (9)
    • collegeclub email (8)
    • erich stauffer figurine (8)
    As you might expect due to the domain name, I get a lot of traffic for the keyword and variations of, “Erich Stauffer”, the Arnart Import’s fake Hummel figurine artist I was named after. Second to that, people are still crazy about Collegeclub.com and seem to still wonder where all of their stuff went when it went belly up. Like them, I was interested so I did some research, found out, and shared it on my blog. I just didn’t think that all these years later it would still be some of my most popular blog posts. The “mexican cat” gets linked to a post called “Smarty Cat” through Google Image Search and that is also the reason “My CEO Heroes” ranks well – people are searching for an image of Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks.

    Top 10 Sources

    • google.com (89)
    • facebook.com (19)
    • qian8ao.com (11)
    • google.co.uk (10)
    • dogpile.com (4)
    • google.ca (4)
    • m.facebook.com (4)
    • google.com.br (3)
    • iphoneunity.com (3)
    • answers.yahoo.com (2)

    I have a pretty active Twitter account so it’s somewhat of a surprise to me to not see Twitter in the referral list, but I did get one (1) referral from Twitter, ranking it at #49. Qian8ao is a “Free Expense-Tracking Application and Personal Finance Community” in China. I’m not sure what link they have pointing to me as Google Analytics can’t resolve it properly and my go-to Google searches aren’t revealing anything, but I’m guessing that it’s not page visits, but a hot-linked image that is causing the count. I post links to this page via my Erich Stauffer Figurines page and the Erich Stauffer page. I have used Yahoo Answers as part of my SEO process successfully for a number of years.

    Income Stats

    • Amazon Associates Affiliate Program: 72 Clicks – 0 Items Ordered – 0 Items Shipped – 0 Advertising Fees
    • Google Adsense: $12.74 Estimate

     

  • Google+ for Business

    Pages for Google+

    Different people are interested in different parts of your business. Whether it’s breaking news, updates, promotions, links, photos – even talking face-to-face with groups via easy-to-use video chat – Google+ lets you easily share the right things with the right customers. And unlike Facebook, Pages for Google+ can actually help your SEO efforts.

    Google advocates putting the +1 button anywhere you’d like people to be able to recommend your business, products or services to friends and contacts all across the web. Google+ makes it easy to learn more about how your followers’ interactions on your page affect your brand, and your business.

    We’ve been testing Pages for Google+ for a couple of months now. We ran into one instance where we couldn’t add more pages for our customers, but we found that we were just in a waiting period before being able to add more. This is probably a built-in protection against spamming.

    Need help setting up your Google+ Page for your business? We can help.

    About Google+

    Google+, the search giant’s new social network and answer to Facebook features a new friend list function called “circles”, which has been very positive overall. Users have commented that it’s the easiest system on the market for putting friends into groups, making it easier to share posts with just your business colleagues or your family. We are really interested in the circles option, but it needs more people on there so it doesn’t die like Google Buzz. We like the idea of circles and the integrated video chat/hangout function. They’re not really inventing anything new, just putting things like Facebook groups and Skype-like chat front and center. It becomes a more cozy place to hang out online. Facebook will start to look more stuck up and sterile over time, the same way MySpace started to look more trashy.

    We have noticed there are less people requesting to be friends and less friend requests being answered. We think Facebook peaked in 2009 and started to decline after that. But even though numbers are down, they are still number one, for now. It has to do with elasticity, which used in this context means peoples ability to want and except change. In the beginning, when things are new, people are more lenient and will try new things, but over time, ideas harden and change becomes harder. It works with friendships, departments, new businesses, and even social networks. We’ve got high hopes for Google’s inventiveness. The on-demand video chat feature called “Hangouts” is a great idea. Considering it’s 2011, We’re suprised that’s not a feature that we take for granted already.

  • How to Get More Customers

    We did a small test to see what were some of the biggest problems business owners had and what we found was the biggest problem was “How to Get More Customers“

    We know that in order to get more customers you must first figure out what your customers pain points are – find out what are the things they are complaining about that you can fix – and then determine if they are both able and willing to pay for them. The first part of that question is called a customer interview.

    Here’s an example: a business owner complains of having too much spam in their email. You respond by creating or finding a product that helps the client reduce their spam and then asking the customer if they would be willing to pay to have their spam reduced. This is called a solution interview.

    Customer and Solution Interviews are part of the Lean Startup methodology, which combines Customer Development and Agile Development to create a more sound Business Model that values learning. Agile and Lean both use iterative processes and the Scientific Method to hypothesize, test, and learn in order to create a product that customers actually want before building it. Once they have this “product/market fit” they built it as fast as possible. Erich Stauffer talks more about this cycle here.

    If you’re solving clients problems you won’t have to do much marketing at all – the customers will seek you out. If they aren’t seeking you out, you might not be solving their problems.

    How do you identify what your customers pain points are?

    The simplest answer is to ask your target client or existing client base what things are bothering them most and when you start to see a trend, you can start to ask if they’d be willing to pay for it to get fixed.

    A less effective, but quicker route is to find out where your customers are complaining or seeking out solutions online. A good way to do this is by using Google Discussion Search to search for problems people are sharing on forums and other discussion groups.

    We did a test search with the term “my business” and this is what we found:

    • My business keeps disappearing from Google Places
    • I need a slogan for my business
    • I need a logo for my Business and possibly a website
    • I need help getting payments to my business
    • What is the best CRM software for my business?
    • Anyone using Dropbox for business file storage?
    • I need a really good name for my business
    • I need help with my business card
    • A client owes my business money… what to do?
    • Can I request to remove my business from Yelp / Qype?
    • I need help getting my business off the ground
    • How to promote a new site?
    • How many of you have tried Offline Marketing ?
    • What’s your most effective marketing method?
    • What is the most important points of business?
    • How to get more customers?

    Once we started noticing a trend, we started recording things we could blog about, solutions for problems like which CRM is best, how to use Dropbox for your business, and how to promote a new website. Our first post is this post, which addresses the last question

    How to Get More Customers?

    1. Identify a need by asking or searching.
    2. Find a solution for that need.
    3. Ask potential clients if they would pay for that solution.
    4. If so, write about it. If not, find a different problem or solution.
    5. Once you’ve written about it, promote it using SEO.

    Essentially you start out with Lean methodologies, then do content marketing, then finish with SEO. So the key to getting more customers is not SEO, it’s knowing you have a product that solves a problem AND people are willing and able to pay for and then writing up content about it on your “home base” and only then doing search engine optimization.

  • Write What Matters to Your Customer

    I’ve been building sites with the thought process that content matters more than SEO. I’ve been doing that by solving peoples problems. I look for those problems by finding sticky posts on forums, reviewing Yahoo Answers questions, and reviewing search terms for people finding my site (only works after you have content).

    Here are some recent graphs of sites once I started using this method:

    What I’ve learned from that is that there are direct search results related to doing this strategy and I spend very little time backlinking because I don’t have to. They customers find me because I’m solving a problem for them – they look for me instead of me trying to bait Google to make them find me over someone else.

    After reading what this sales guy, Frank Rumbauskas of Never Cold Call (Again), has written and listening to his webinar, I’ve realized that the crux of his premise is that by creating content on your blog or in an email or fax that you send, you’re answering a problem, fixing something that your customers care about.

    The result is that you’re spending more of your time finding out what problems your customers are having, solving those problems and publishing the results so that other people who are looking for the same solutions find you and hire you. You’re no longer selling, you’re taking business as it comes to you, and it will.

    Don’t get me wrong, SEO is not useless. In fact it can be often be very useful as 70-80% of all traffic is organic vs. paid. I make part of my living from SEO web design, but I also make part of my income from affiliate marketing. Those are somewhat in juxtaposition as I make money from people who want more organic results and from people buying ads that display on my sites.

  • Backlink Bookmarks

    This is a list of sites I use to backlink from for myself and my web design, SEO, and social media marketing clients:

    Social Bookmarking Sites

    Social Networking Sites
    • Facebook – necessary socially, but doesn’t help much with SEO
    • Google+ – more effective than Facebook
    • Twitter – can be used to display Facebook posts for SEO reasons
    • YouTube – most effective, but requires the most effort
    Online Classified Ads

  • Our Client is #1 on Google for Indianapolis Dentist

    image

    By using our SEO and social media management, Dr. Reese, DDS, MAGD is now the #1 ranked search engine result on Google for the term, Indianapolis Dentist. Using SEO and Social Media Management, we beat out hundreds of other dentists and we can do the same for you – even if you’re not a dentist. Use our contact page to get started or read our testimonials.