After years of working as an independent copywriter and SEO writer, I have formed a new company with a partner – my long-time colleague and SEO mentor, Pat Assad.

Our company is called Azura Marketing. Our tagline, “We work the web for you,” encapsulates exactly what we do for our clients. Keeping pace with the ever-quickening pulse of online marketing, we can help you realize the rich opportunities of the new frontier.

The right mix of Internet marketing strategies can:

• Give your website stand-out power with SEO and PPC
• Help you connect with your Internet audience on a personal level with SEO copywriting
• Create a site that is a hub of interactive activity with SEO-friendly website design and programming
• Ensure that you’re mixing and mingling at all the web hot spots for your industry with social media
• Position you as the go-to expert in your field
• Turn your site into a sales-building machine
• Improve conversion rates
• Create meaningful, long-term relationships with your clients and prospects through email marketing

Let’s face it. Between PPC, SEO, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, autoresponders,  and more, the web has become an intricate digital labyrinth. Just talking about this stuff can send most people into a tailspin – let alone actually doing it.

That’s where we come in. Between our two heads, we have more than two decades of experience working in web environments. And many of our clients have watched their websites (and profits) soar to new heights with our help.

If you want to set your site higher, please visit us at  Azura Marketing.

Again – many thanks for checking in on Mud Creative. I hope that we can continue our professional relationship on the other side.

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photo credit: Search Engine People Blog

What’s a keyword?

Keywords (or keyphrases) are the words people type in the Google box to find something specific on the web.

Why do I care?

Let’s say you run a daycare centre in Toronto. A searcher types “Toronto daycare centre” in the search box, and you just happen to have this phrase on your site.

The engines find your site, determine that it has the keyphrase and surrounding information to support it, and in seconds your site is recommended to the searcher.

If your site is on the first page of the SERPs (search engine results pages), chances are good that the searcher will click through for a visit.

How do I know what phrases people are using to find sites like mine?

People search like they talk. They don’t necessarily know industry jargon or model numbers. Think like your customer. If you were chatting with your neighbor over the hedge, how would you ask him for a recommendation on buying a widget?

Here on some basic guidelines for creating a list:

a) Write down as many phrases (2 – 3 words each) you can think of that describe your product or service. Ask your salespeople how customers refer to your product or service. Talk to your front desk personnel about questions callers are asking. Get ideas from friends and neighbours who don’t know your business like you do.

TIP: Avoid very generic words like “furniture,” “used cars,” and “vacation.”  They are simply too difficult to compete with. “Vacation” has 165,000,000 results in Google, but “cheap vacations for backpackers” has 108,000. Be as specific as possible to narrow the field.

b) Now that you know which phrases appropriately describe your product or service, you want to whittle your list down to those that are actually searched for. To do this, you can purchase a short-term subscription to Wordtracker ($59US) or you can use Google’s free Keyword Suggestion Tool.

The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool is created for people advertising with Google, but it works for anyone. Enter any keyphrases you want to research and click “Get keyword ideas.” You will be presented with a list of the most popular search words and phrases related to your keyphrases that are currently being searched on a monthly basis. Create a list of those with a high volume of searches that relate to your product.

c) Next you want to see how much competition your phrases have. An easy way to do this is to go to Google and type: allintitle:“yourkeywordphrasehere” (make sure to include the quotes).

The pages Google returns for each phrase will be pages that are using that exact phrase in the Title Tag. (The Title Tag is a key area that search engines looks for keyphrases.) You’ll find this number on the right hand side of the screen right above Sponsored Links. The fewer competing pages, the better your chances of ranking for that keyphrase.

TIP: If your location is important to your customers, be sure to consider geographical keyphrases such as “insurance broker in London” or “daycare center in Vancouver.” These keyphrases may not show up in the Google Keyword Suggestion tool, but they are very powerful for attracting your local audience.

This sounds like a lot of work. Is there an easier way?

OK, so you’ve got better things to do. Plus you want to make darn sure your keyphrases are right. Fortunately there are professionals who specialize in this very thing. A keyword research specialist will do all the footwork for you, present you with a solid list of keyphrases, and recommend which ones are suitable for each page on your site.

If you’re looking for a keyword specialist, we know some good ones. Ask us and we’ll set you up!

Big job. Done.

In Part 2 of “The neophyte guide to keyword research,” we talk about putting your keyphrases to work on your site.

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1. A neophyte guide to using keywords – Part 2
2. Free Social Media Listening Tools
3. SEO. The quicker fixer upper – NOT!

Wrong.

As I tell all of my clients, SEO is not a quick fix, but an ongoing effort. While it may appear to work initially, this could be but a blip in the radar. If you look away, your SEO efforts fizzle. And then you’re back at square one. Here’s why:

If your site wasn’t designed with SEO in mind in the first place, your SEO efforts are more of a band-aid. Perhaps you’ve had some new title and meta tags created and added some keyphrases in strategic places. But this will only take you so far.

A solid SEO strategy goes deeper into restructuring the architecture of the site, coding it in such a way that it is easy for the engines to read and follow, writing pages that specifically target highly researched keyphrases, using keyword-rich hyperlinks that lay down a scent and lead visitors logically from page to page, and much more.

If your site doesn’t have fresh, changing content, both the engines and your visitors eventually lose interest. Your site needs to be dynamic, with lots of juicy stuff for visitors to consume. As the engines see it, if your site is static, then it won’t be valuable for searchers. That means it eventually drops down on the results pages.

If your site isn’t popular with other sites, it won’t be popular with the engines. An oft-ignored SEO tactic is link building. The more links you have coming into your site, the more popular it is perceived to be to the engines. To get links, you need to engage in tactics such as online press releases and articles, plus social media channels like blogging and Twitter.

If your site isn’t engaging your visitors, they won’t stick around. The real reason you want to optimize your site is not to get better rankings and more traffic, but to get more qualified traffic coming to your site to buy your product or service.

A well-optimized, well-written and well-planned site will be a rich bed of content for your visitors. Your dynamic site will give your visitors what they want in the form of copy that engages them and offers a solution to their problems, and an active blog and/or articles that keep them informed. Other ideas include a free newsletter, ebook, white paper or report that they can download and refer to, a contest, a coupon or a free product sample.

If your website is offering what visitors are looking for, they stay awhile. Your bounce rate (the rate at which visitors leave your site) decreases. Your conversion rate increases.

If you’re serious about optimizing your site, don’t apply a band-aid. Your site wasn’t created overnight (I hope not anyway), and your SEO shouldn’t be either.

Related posts:

1. A neophyte guide to using keywords – Part 2
2. A neophyte guide to keyword research – Part 1
3. Why free press release sites may be all you need

PRWeb releases hit top sites like Google News and Yahoo News – the #1-ranked online news site – as well as industry-specific websites and blogs. Depending on the level of service purchased, you can choose to issue your release to a number of specific industry and regional newsfeeds. At the top level, your release will be distributed to the Associated Press top-circulation daily newspapers.

Like many of us in this business, PRWeb has had to evolve with the changing landscape of the Internet. Now you can add images, PDFs, videos and podcasts to create the multimedia release. To capture the attention of the social media crowd, you can link it to your Twitter account and add Technorati tags for the blogging community.

Then there are the reporting functions of PRWeb. Want to know how well your release did? You’ll get a PDF report that indicates:

• The number of headline impressions
• The number of full page reads
• Percentage of visits by country
• Top 20 search terms used to find your release
• Comparisons of releases for your organization
• At the top level, your report will actually show you what city in the world your release readers are coming from

If you want to take advantage of this great service with a great press release, I can help. Let’s talk.

Related posts:

1. Did it work? Tips on measuring the success of your online press release.
2. Why free press release sites may be all you need
3. Shipping your online press release overseas – different story

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