Hotels on the Las Vegas strip clearly get much more traffic than the hotels that are located in the lesser attractive off-strip areas; and it is with this very simple analogy we have the objective for our internet marketing strategy, we want our web sites to be on the strip!

Okay the, so how do we move our web sites high up the search engine rankings to be exposed to maximum eyeballs?  The answer is pretty simple, if not a little confusing at the outset, and that is  ‘indirect’ Internet marketing.

The problem with indirect Internet marketing is quite simply the word ‘indirect’ because most businesses expect, and measure, their marketers on some form of direct marketing. However, with Internet marketing, the only part of the marketing process that we control is the on-page search engine optimization (SEO) of our web site and that may only count for 30% to 40% of the elements required for a complete search-marketing program. We must pay attention to ‘off-page’ SEO.

However, while SEO is not an exact science, it is the off-page SEO activities that separates the web sites from those that are ‘on the strip’ from those that are ‘off-strip’; and it is this off-page SEO that calls for an ‘indirect’ internet marketing strategy.

Search engines measure the value of a web site by the number of other websites that link to that site and this is where it is imperative to develop and execute an aggressive strategy that falls within the guidelines laid out by Google. If two web sites have identical on-page SEO, it will be the site with the best off-page SEO that will rank higher with the search engine.

So, what should the core of an indirect Internet marketing strategy look like?

1)   Connect with friendly web sites to link back to your site.

2)   Join many forums and become active in many discussions; and ensure that your URL is included in your signature.

3)   Develop and host groups on all social networking media web sites to promote your business and update on a regular basis.

4)   Issue press releases on a regularly via paid, and free, PR web outlets

5)   Write article for ezines

6)   Add a blog to your site but do not use it to sell your products directly, use the blog to position your brand as being expert in your field. Every time you make a blog entry you will increase both the size and the freshness of your site and if you can get subscribers to your site you will be well on your way.

7)   Take part in all industry associations.

8)   Be relentless

These tactics could be considered to have little value individually, but collectively this a is a powerful force.

To accomplish the above you have to pursue it, as it will not come to you. There is a lot of work, much of it mundane, involved in executing an indirect marketing strategy but if executed you will move you business onto ‘the strip’ where the foot traffic is great and opportunities abound.

SEO, WEB Marketing Hide

In many regards,  search engine optimization is a black art because there is not a set of definitive rules to follow, therefore,  much is left to both interpretation and emotion. Emotive decision factors are never a good thing!  Google publish a set of best practice guidelines but there are many nuances above and beyond the guidelines that define them as that guidelines not rules.. However, SEOMOZ.org publishes a list of the top SEO factors as assessed by a panel of experts and below is the top five from their overiew, for search marketers this is an invaluable report. Read the full report here What is interesting about this survey is that even that panel of experts cannot agree and where consensus is not achieved a contentious factor is assigned. This is good reading for the search marketer.

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

   73% very high importance

2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)

   71% very high importance

3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)

   67% very high importance

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

   66% very high importance

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)

   66% very high importance

SEO Hide

A commonly missed opportunity when building web sites is the failure to search engine optimize images. In a competitive world, any edge that you can gain over your competition  should and must be taken. If you fully optimize your images it is more than likely that your competitor has not, because seldom do, and you will gain an edge and this edge may push you higher in organic search rankings. We need focus our attention on two attributes: the file name and the HTML ALT tag.

FILE NAME: Most images on web sites have generic names either the nomenclature which is assigned by the camera (IMG_1234, DSC_7897 etc) or are assigned the generic name of a web template e,.g photo1, photo2, image1, image2 etc. While these are extremely convenient that are useless from an SEO perspective. How many people with search for IMG_1234? It is important to rename all of your photos which include the primary search keyword. For instance, I am sports photographer and as such it is important that I include the name of the event in each photo. So, if my camera outputs file#   IMG_1756, I will rename that to CVS_Downtown_5K_09202009_IMG1756.jpg now we have a file name that makes sense to a search engine by carrying the event name and I retain the file name for my library purposes (which is very important, trust me!) If you can be more specific with your file name, you should be, but as I may shoot 1,000 to 4,000 images at an event, I have to take a more general approach.

ALT tag: this allows you to assign description to an image in the example above – CVS_Downtown_5K_09202009_IMG1756.jpg – I would add a more specific description e.g ” Shalane Flanagan winning the 2009 CVS Downtown 5K in Providence, Rhode Island”

Now, we have both our image name and image ALT tag with descriptions which include search terms.

Also, make sure that you turn on the search images attribute in Google.

ALT tag, file name, SEO Hide

One of the more important actions that we can undertake as Webmasters (and Webmistresses) is to manage our sites via the tools offered to us by the major search engines, using the following links

• Google Webmaster tool
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster central

At each of these sites we can upload our sitemap.xml files  and can perform a myriad of other webmaster management functions. If you are not yet using these tools – click on these links and set up accounts for your sites.

Bing webmaster central, google webmaster, Yahoo site explorer Hide

Once we have created the all important sitemap.xml file,  we must inform the search engine crawlers of its location and there are several methods of doing his:

1. send an HTTP request
2. upload the sitemap.xml file directly to the search engines
3. add the location of the sitemap in your robots.txt file

In this blog entry I will only address # 3. While I do upload my sitemap.xml files to the major search engines, I also add the location of the sitemap file to the robots.txt file because all crawlers that look at the  robots.txt file wil be directed to my sitemaps and not just the search engines where I manually uploaded the site map. The following is the actual robots.txt file from http://webdesign-ri.com

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://webdesign-ri.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://webdesign-ri.com/sitemap.htm
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /case_studies/

In the second line I have provided the path for the sitemap.xml file and in the 3rd line I have added a path to the sitemap.htm file.

robots.txt, sitemap.xml Hide

Key word density is simply the relationship between the frequency of the usage of keywords and key phrases and the total word count.

Mathematically,  it can be expressed as  (The number of word/phrase repeats * the number of words in  the phrase  / total number of words on each page) * 100

What value does it have from an SEO perspective? Well, search engines have a desired keyword density of  3% to 5%. Anything over 5% may be frowned upon as ‘keyword stuffing’ and anything less than 3% is an indicator that your keywords do not have enough frequency.

How do you measure keyword density? I use the Firefox plugin for SEOQuake and what I particular like about this tool is the ability to import key words and phrases from Google allowing the key words to be modeled.  The way to use the information is to adjust your most important key words/phrases to fall in the 3% to 5% range – it is pretty impossible to do this for all of your keywords and have text which is readable for human beings.

keyword density Hide

The following are ‘landmines’ which should be avoided, like the plague, if you wish you web site to perform well during organic searches.

Do not use

• hidden text or hidden links
• cloaking redirects
• automated queries
• keyword stuffing  with totally irrelevant keywords
• duplicate content on pages, domains or sub-domains
• (and this is obvious) undertake malicious behaviour such as phishing, viruses etc

SEO Hide

What is a canonical redirect? For my web site the Canonical URL is http://webdesign-ri.com and this is the primary address for my domain and the address http://www.webdesign-ri.com is considered a different address unless we instruct the server to ‘join-the-dots’ and this process is called a canonical redirect. We use what is called a permanent 301 redirect a method of pointing www.webdesign-ri.com to webdesign-ri.com ( and all pages on the site) such that it is transparent to the user. To see it in action type in www.webdesign-ri.com and you will see webdesign-ri.com appear in the address bar.

To execute a canonical redirect on an Apache server, we must add  a little  code to the .htaccess file. The code below is the actual code from my .htaccess file, to adapt this for your web site simply swap out my domain for yours.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^webdesign-ri\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://webdesign-ri.com/$1 [R=301,L]

.htaccess, canonical redirect Hide

When you make a changes to your web site, the live version often gets out of synch. with the cached version of your site which resides on Google. When the Googlebots crawl a site they store a record, a snapshot in time, into a cache file.In the example above, from an organic Google search, there is a link to the cached copy, now if the link no longer exists the person browsing will be faced with a 404 error ( and not everyone creates a custom 404 page ) and this will also show up as a dead link which may impact your SEO performance.

There is a solution at hand – Google’s URL removal tool, which is part of the Webmaster Tools suite. Simply enter the name of the dead URL and Google will remove it..the process does take a few days but it is a great way of keeping your cached version of your site clean to both give your browsers a more pleasurable viewing experience and assists to optimize your site.

Google cache, remove URL Hide