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Client Profile - Artizara.com

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

The concept of ‘modesty’ is a common thread among the major monotheistic faiths of the Abrahamic tradition; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A modestly dressed woman is not “oppressed’, but “empowered”. By electing to cover herself she forces those around her to focus on her intellect, and not on her body. Artizara is all about finding common ground among women of diverse faiths and cultures, presenting the beauty inherent in the Islamic faith, challenging stereotypes, and letting the world know that Muslim women are enlightened, vibrant and active members of the communities they live in.

Artizara.com was founded in 2004 to fulfill the Islamic and modest clothing needs of socially conscious women who desire to dress stylishly yet modestly. With the idea of blending world style with Islamic heritage, Artizara decided to survey the marketplace for the latest in women’s fashion. Realizing how difficult it was for women to find fashionable and trendy modest clothing at an affordable price, they went straight to the manufacturers and started designing Islamic apparel themselves. Comparing itself to other online stores, Artizara offers the latest attractions for women’s apparel including modest wedding dresses, headscarves and trendy jackets priced at very competitive rates. From tunic tops to the latest Islamic jewelry, Artizara.com has pioneered its way into becoming a leading provider of modest apparel for women of all faiths who share the same motto: “Dressing modestly is cool”.

Since their debut, Artizara has been presented in the press including several newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post. It has also been featured on Bridges TV with the aim of fostering a better understanding among other cultures and diverse populations about Islamic clothing.

Earlier this year, Artizara signed on as both a pay-per-click and SEO client. With an integrated approach, Wpromote has been able to continually help improve online marketing spend through the use of PPC and SEO data across both paid and organic search campaigns.

While still early in the campaign, Artizara is starting to climb rankings for both broad and long tail keywords. In the next few months, we will be building out a new “Resources” section for Artizara.com to help transform it into an online hub and authoritative resource for Islamic clothing.

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Tags: artizara, islamic clothing, modest clothing, search engine optimization, SEO, Wpromote
Posted in SEO, Wpromote | 1 Comment »

4 Ways to Keep Your Content Fresh (When Writing For the Same KWs)

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

It is an absolute certainty that SEO writers will, from time to time, be faced with the prospect of writing multiple content articles that address the same keywords. Oh, were it a perfect world, Google would simply look the other way whilst we copied, pasted, and self-plagiarized to our heart’s content, and we would be rewarded with higher rankings just the same. Perfection isn’t realistic, of course, and this particular brand of it shouldn’t even be strived for; Google desires fresh, unique content if it’s to even consider your work. So how does one navigate this particular conundrum? How are we to keep our content fresh while targeting the same keywords over and over again?

1. Audience Juggling

My go to move when having to write about the same keyword in multiple ways is envisioning the different demographics my content might target. Writing a piece with a certain audience in mind – say, parents of teenagers – will help set the tone, the subject matter, and the general course of the content. Follow that up with content using the same keyword, except targeted toward the teens themselves. Just make a list of all the people who might buy this product or type this keyword into Google. Go down that list and target each group with a different slant. This won’t just help you pump out unique content; it’ll also improve your writing and make it more effective.

2. Google Search

Run a search using the keywords. You’re not plagiarizing, but you are removing yourself from the internal headspace that can sometimes stagnate your progress. Just get an idea for all the different types of results that can come from your keywords. You may have been fixated on a particular angle that was preventing any deviation, and taking a look at all the possibilities could be refreshing.

3. Change Perspectives

Write from the vantage point of someone else. You’ve just written about “English learning courses” from the perspective of the teacher setting the curriculum. Why not write about them as a former, or current, student? You’ll be talking about the same subject, referencing the same keywords, but you’ll be coming from a completely unique angle.

4. Take a Walk

Seriously. Get up from the desk. Get out in the sun. Soak up some Vitamin D, get the blood circulating. Physical activity actually stimulates our brains, especially repetitive movements like walking. Your brain requires oxygen and nutrients for proper function, and moving around allows your blood to send the good stuff upstairs. Take half an hour to walk around and ponder the content, and then get back to the computer – refreshed and relaxed.

It can be difficult to manage unique content while hitting the same exact keywords over and over again, but with a fresh perspective or two (and maybe some fresh legs), you can make your content stand out without blending in.

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Tags: new content, same keywords, SEO, unique content
Posted in SEO | 4 Comments »

Google’s Webmaster Tools Revamped.. What Does this Mean for SEOs?

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

NEW WEBMASTER TOOLS UNVEILED

- Fixes and more! Google has been listening (did they ever stop?).

If you did not know this, Yesterday Google announced a new version of Webmaster Tools.

Login to your Google account, click on Webmaster Tools (if you’ve never been there before, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools you will need a Google account) and click on the ‘Check out our new look!’ link to see for yourself:

Our SEO Team was waiting for something to happen as we noticed a lack of reporting happening across the board on all Webmaster Tools accounts and sure enough, Google was up to something again.

This short video explains just some of the new features, notably the ability to have an email address to send reports to that is not necessarily the same as the account you login with:

One of the most USEFUL things in Webmaster Tools, particularly for Keyword Discovery, an important part of Search Engine Optimization in the early and ongoing phases of a campaign is the ‘Top Search Queries’ that Google’s Webmaster Tools Provides.

This NEW version (Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, and Josh Teague, Interaction Designer, Webmaster Tools Team-props for working with SEOs to make this better) actually gives you much more information than in the past and simply straight up tells you what keywords are causing YOUR page to be displayed in the Google Search Results Pages. Further, the right side column tells you which results actually were clicked-through to your page, helping you see which keywords are actually providing real traffic from organic search.

OTHER CHANGES

We’ve now noticed that it will be easier to talk less ’savvy’ webmasters through this interface as the area for duplicate Meta Descriptions and Titles, now called ‘HTML Suggestions’.

ANNOYANCES

What I can’t stand is that this information provided in the ‘Top Search Queries’ does not really reflect the current search results and is rarely accurate. For example, we see that we’re ranking for ‘Google Logo’ in the #3 position, with a click-through showing the #2 position, however I never saw it anywhere within the first 100 results when searching for it myself.

So please keep in mind that these ‘Top Search Queries’ may be ‘one time occurences’ at the time of the snapshot that Google took, or perhaps filtered in some bizarre way, or from a different data center possibly from where you are (likely a combination of all of these factors).

POSITIVES

At least this tool will provide you with knowledge of things being searched on in your niche, which when combined with the adwords keyword tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - to find search volumes for new terms, can help you really round out your keyword list to target.

We’ll work with this new format and post responses or a new blog as we find more juicy tibits about Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Feel free to comment if you have noticed anything else so far.

Thanks, - Aaron Kronis - Director of Search Engine Optimization, Wpromote Inc.

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Tags: Google Changes, google webmaster tools, google webmaster tools team, google webmasters, josh teague, new google tools, new webmaster tools, sagar kamdar, search engine optimization, SEO, Webmaster Tools Changes, Webmaster Tools Update
Posted in Google, Internet News, SEO | 1 Comment »

Client Profile - TOMS Shoes

Monday, May 4th, 2009

TOMS Shoes was founded on a simple premise: For every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of shoes to a child in need. One for One. Using the purchasing power of individuals to benefit the greater good is what TOMS Shoes is all about. TOMS mission is made possible because they minimize their marketing budget by utilizing an enormous volunteer network across the US. In fact, one of the few areas they have a significant marketing spend is in Search Engine Marketing.

The Business Challenge

Tomsshoes.com had decided to create and launch a new website to promote their business of giving one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair purchased. The new design would need to be search friendly, but also user friendly and clearly stay on track for their marketing initiatives. The timeline for the launch was for mid-summer (August 1st, 2009).

Site Launch Pre-Planning Meeting

Wpromote personally met with the site’s designers (the design team flew in from Chicago) to go over the goals of the new site and to determine any possible roadblocks or problems. From an SEO perspective there were many issues that needed to be drawn to the attention of the programmers, such as product pages requiring static links to ensure proper indexing of those pages. As the site uses an overlay, we had to make sure that it did not prevent the pages from being crawled.

Planning an Accelerated Launch Schedule

An opportunity arose for Toms to be involved with an AT&T commercial that featured the company’s CEO, Blake Mycoskie and how his use of the Blackberry on AT&T was pivotal to his communication needs for the company. This meant that the launch had to be pushed up to mid April. This also meant that we had to ensure to include keywords related to this ‘AT&T Shoe Commercial’ on the new website.

Implementation & Rankings Preservation

The team went to great lengths to ensure that any URLs being changed would have appropriate 301 redirects in place to preserve search engine rankings and maintain any current inbound links without returning any 404 error messages, which could cause inbound links to decrease.

Traffic Related Issues

After the site launch, during the high swells of traffic, we had to quickly initiate a plan that would not see the site bogged down or offline if too many visitors were on the site at the same time.

Using newly released techniques directing Google and other search engine spiders to the ‘canonical’ version of the site’s homepage, we were able to successfully offload traffic to other servers without the multiple homepage URLs causing any duplicate content problems.

The Results

On Sunday April 12th, we saw the daily traffic peak at 115,144 unique visitors. This was highly successful. Prior to the new site launch in December 2008 to April 2009, this was an increase from an average of 10,000 daily unique visitors in December 1st, 2009 at a percentage increase of 1100%.

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Tags: Case Study, Client Profile, SEO, TOMS Shoes, Wpromote
Posted in Internet News, Online Advertising, SEO, Social Media, Viral Marketing, Wpromote | No Comments »

An Intro Into SEO Content Analysis

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Search engine optimization deals a lot with logic and problem solving. Often times this includes figure out what works best for a client, where their web site stands, and how they can improve upon it. With this comes some of the more technical aspects of SEO (URL restructuring, 301 redirects, cannonicalization issues, site maps, etc.), but there are also a lot of common sense aspects such as web site content.

SEO content analysis can be both tricky and simple. Content can be well-written and garner attention, interest, desire and action yet do nothing for search engine rankings. On the flip side, content can be poorly written and not convert, yet rank well in search engines. The trick with content is finding a happy medium between these two extremes that satisfies both search engines and potential customers.

So where can you start with optimizing content? For most small to medium sized web sites, content solutions may be more straight forward. Content can come in the form of resource sections, FAQs, industry news feeds & blogs. Optimizing this content and constantly adding new pages can help make a web site become much more relevant on the subject matter being written about. But when dealing with larger ecommerce web sites that either sell the same products offered by others (i.e. video games, computer parts or electronics), content issues arise with duplicate content, scrapers, and competitors using the same product information & specs.

So how do you make content good? In 3 words, make it unique, useful, and relevant. Let’s tackle these one at a time.

What Is Unique Content?

Search engines hate duplicate content. Just because your web site has been crawled does not mean it will be included in the search engines’ index. Make your content unique, don’t copy from others. If you are using product descriptions, make sure your competitors or vendors are not using identical ones. Unique content can also be free, great examples of free unique content are in the form of customer testimonials, reviews & photos.

What Is Useful Content?

As search engine algorithms become more complicated, it’s very likely that bounce rates, conversion rates, traffic & subscription rates become factored into rankings. When writing useful content, both the reader and search engines should be considered. Useful content should be properly titled (Page Titles), formatted with Hx tags (H1, H2, etc.), and unique (see above).

What Is Relevant Content?

Relevant content is content that makes sense to exist on that web site. If your web site is about led lighting, then content about backyard playgrounds isn’t going to help you much from an SEO perspective. This is not to say that content on a web site cannot deviate from it’s SEO goals, but more that content that is related to the same niche will help a web site more.

So how is your content doing? Here’s a few questions to analyze your content:

What is the main keyword you are targeting?
Is this keyword in your page titles?
Are all of your page titles the same?
How is your meta description, is the keyword in there?
Do you have duplicate meta descriptions?
Do you use any H1 tags? If so, are they optimized?
Do you use any H2 tags? If so, are they optimized?
How many words of content do you have on each page?
How many times are your keywords mentioned on your web site? Is it natural, or are you keyword stuffing?
Lastly, what are your competitors doing?

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Tags: content analysis, content writing, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in SEO | 6 Comments »

An Intro Into SEO Keyword Analysis

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Yesterday we hosted our Basic SEO Techniques Webinar (slideshow now available, link below) and I thought I’d elaborate further on the portion we briefly glanced over, keyword analysis.

First off, what is keyword analysis?

In short, keyword analysis is the process of going through a web site and identifying what the most important keywords are that will drive targeted and relevant traffic to that web site. This can be comprised of a list of top selling items, products with the best ROI, services offered, industry specific terms, or much more. There really isn’t a finite number of keywords a web site can target, but at the same time, it’s important to target keywords that help bring in the types of visitors that bring you closer to your business’ goal.

Is it any different from normal keyword analysis?

Yes! When doing keyword research for SEO, another variable must be figured in: How well the web site currently performing. More established web sites with an aged domain and strong back links are in a better position to target broad keywords, while newer web sites with little or no content are at a disadvantage and are probably better off targeting longer tail keywords. Just because two web sites are selling the same items or providing similar services, does not necessarily mean the keywords they target should be same.

Why Is Keyword Analysis Important for SEO:

Keyword analysis, if done incorrectly can be detrimental to an SEO campaign. Not only is money badly spent, but time and opportunity loss. A great method used by more and more SEOs is analyzing PPC data for top performing keywords and optimizing for those.

Types Of Keywords Worth Targeting:

New to this? Here are the type of keywords you’ll want to consider targeting:

Top Selling Products - Pick your top 3 and run with those.
Your Brand Name - Are you ranking 3rd for your company’s name? Why aren’t you first? Optimize for this term!
Top Converting Services or Products - What product or service is converting the best from PPC ads? Target this term! In time, higher organic rankings for this term should improve your quality score and help lower your CPC.
Category & Genre Specific - Are you selling shoes? Chances are you won’t rank for “shoes” alone. Start targeting main categories and sub-categories such as “running shoes,” “basketball shoes,” “mens jogging shoes,” etc.
Model # Specific Terms - Are you selling the Cisco IP Phone 7940 Model? Target that term, not just “VOIP Phones” or “Cisco Phones”

Organize Your Keywords

Select 5 broad keywords. If Google let you target 5 keywords with PPC ads and gave you the top spot free for 1 month, what keywords would you choose? These are probably the long-term goals that you’d want to do well on and can potentially bring in the most relevant traffic. These are also often the hardest to rank for. (i.e. lawyer, criminal attorney, etc.)
Select 10 longer tail keywords (longer hanging fruit). These are your immediate goals. (i.e. El Segundo lawyer, South Bay attorney, etc.)

Further Keyword Research

1. Once you’ve made this list, drop it into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and see what results come up. Did you miss any synonyms? If so, start refining your list to add in more terms. At this point some light bulbs should be flashing. You should now have a sense for what keywords bring in the most traffic and the ones less searched.

2. Use Google Suggestions to your advantage. What keywords are coming up? While how to optimize for these variations is another blog post in itself, this should give you an idea into terms that can bring in relevant traffic or that your competitors may be optimizing for.

3. Expanded list of useful related searches
In my previous blog post, I wrote about the expanded list of related searches Google implemented. Use this data to your advantage.

4. Amazon searches! What are people searching for and buying on Amazon.com?

Hopefully this post has provided you a basic understanding into the keyword selection and analysis process for SEO. Keyword analysis is not always the same for all web sites. User intent and search trends often also play a role into what keywords should be optimized for.