automaticable

It has been a while since I’ve posted on automaticable, so let me catch the world up on a few things.

First, I’m still doing SEO at BKV in Atlanta. And by that, I mean it is taking over my life. Because of the life-takeover problem BKV graciously hired me an assistant, Tom. He is brand new to the SEO world (just as I was) but will become an expert shortly since I’m kind of throwing him in the deep end. Sink or swim, baby.

Not only am I (and Tom) working on SEO, but we’re also in charge of everything social media at BKV. That means we get to spend most of our day on Twitter, Facebook, and every other site most companies ban access to. Sweet deal. If you have Twitter and want to follow me, you can find me at twitter.com/kwegner. Make sure to @me so I know you are automaticable fan.

I don’t usually like to pump work stuff on personal posts, however we are doing social media work for a non-profit right now that is totally awesome. We are working on promoting an event for the March of Dimes called “March for Babies.” It is an event to help raise money to support research into premature birth & other birth problems. If you want to help out the cause, check out www.marchforbabies.org or follow March for Babies on Twitter at twitter.com/marchforbabies.

That is it on the update. Expect more posts from me in the near future, as I’ve recently been reinvigorated by the fact that automaticable just suprassed 100,000 total views.

One of the hardest questions I get asked is “What do you do?” Of course I could just say “SEO” and leave it at that, but for the vast majority of people, that will leave them more confused than before they asked the question. There are a number of different levels of explanation I go through, each one a test to see how much the questioner really wants to know and how much they will understand.

Continue reading “Defining SEO For the Uninitiated”

Since my upgrade to lead Organic Search Specialist at BKV I’ve been involved in a number of new business pitches. The most recent I’m a part of is for a new client who has partnered with one of our existing paid search clients.  They are going through a site overhaul and need some heavy duty SEO work. I’m talking a serious overhaul too; the client has over 400 individual domains. While they are working off a newly created template, it is still a beast to manage.

Because the client was a partner of one of our existing paid search clients, our strategy was to project our traffic and sales growth numbers off of our current client. What we quickly found out, however, was that this was not going to be possible.

After working out the numbers–direct traffic, search traffic, sales, leads, conversions, etc.–the figures we were coming out with were not making any sense. Somehow we had projected that with a decrease in traffic we could almost double their sales leads. Obviously something was wrong.

When the conversion rate matters

When we went back to the raw data, comparing our existing client to their partner they referred our SEO services to, we saw what the real problem was. Our prospective client was driving plenty of traffic, both through paid search and SEO. What they weren’t doing, however, was converting. Their conversion rate was nearly 1/4th that of what we were benchmarking from.

Finding this out early gave us a huge advantage, as now we can plan and project off 2 separate strategies, regular SEO and increasing website conversions. Justifying our costs is going to be even easier than we expected.

How to increase organic conversions

Increasing organic conversions is different than improving paid search conversion rates. Instead of calling out deals, adding starbursts, or using any other regular direct response techniques, converting organic traffic takes finesse. Instead of blasting potential customers with advertising techniques, the conversions need to come naturally. This can mean a number of things, but sometimes it’s the simplest techniques that make the biggest difference.

Keep it above the fold

Whatever your conversion method may be, you need to have access to it above the fold. This means the first section a user sees when they load a page needs to include your phone number, address, email signup, web form, or any combination of the above. The client we are pitching had their phone number above the fold, but it was tiny, gray on black text that screamed “IGNORE ME!”  Also, their main conversion metric, web leads through a contact form, wasn’t even available on the home page. After clicking through 2 whole layers the user would find the form…below the fold!

Lesson learned

Increasing the conversion rate for a client like this is going to be a no-brainer. With a few simple techniques, their sales leads should increase 2-3 times what they expected. But what have I learned from this? Most importantly, I’ve learned that SEO is about much more than title tags, descriptions and alt tags. At the end of the day the job of an SEO is to make your client richer through organic traffic. Whether that means #1 rankings, leveraging social media, or increasing conversion rates, the client will be happy if there is more money in their pocket.

That’s right people.  Kyle Wegner, everyday SEO and automaticable contributor, is internationally famous.  How is this possible, you ask?  Well, the image you see in this post was used by a fellow named Martin Menu in a presentation in France last week.  The conference he presented at was called the Atlassian User Group, which you can find more information about here (site in French).  In the presentation he not only included my image, but a By: line, so my name has now been recognized internationally.

The reason I know about this is because Martin contacted me and asked permission to use the image I created.  Though the image has been realeased under the Creative Commons Licence (with some restrictions), I really appreciated him asking whether he could use it or not.  The internet is such a free for all with people stealing other people’s work, and it is nice to know that some people still respect the hard work people put into their art.

If the presentation ever gets put online and Martin follows up with me with the link, I’ll definitely be posting it here.  Until then, just know that a group of people on the Champs Elysees saw my RSS image and name during some conference on June 19th. 

A few weeks ago I posted about how I had a couple of exciting announcements to make. Since then, 1 of the deals has fallen through the cracks. I was sad at first, but it has actually turned out to be a good thing for me in the end. The second announcement, though, is still going strong and I am ready to talk about it more publicly.

When I made the announcement I had just learned of a new SEO technique that sounded very promising. It is something that has very little risk, but presents a huge reward if implemented correctly. I am being vague here for a reason; if I gave away too many specifics on top of a link to the new site I am running, someone could come in and take away my competitive advantage. I’m sure any of you SEO gurus could probably figure out the gist of what I am doing by studying the site for a while, but the technique is fairly intricate and focused, so it wont be immediately apparent.

So what is this site? Well, it is a blog (well, not really…) called Review: Gibson Guitars. It fuses my interest in music and guitars with my experience with SEO, and is starting to look promising. I only have a handful of posts up there right now and I am working on getting a few more up soon. My goal is to make the site a great destination for people interested in Gibson guitars and guitar buying in general. So if you are interested in what I’ve been working on lately, or want to learn about guitars in general, go check out my new site about Gibson guitars!

Working on SEO projects can be difficult and time consuming, but with the right tools you can cut your research time down significantly. Firefox has made the job of the SEO expert not only easier, but more efficient at the same time. So without further ado, here is my list of the top 12 SEO Firefox extensions. Continue reading “The Top 12 SEO Firefox Extensions”

As promised earlier, here is my first post regarding my new position in the interactive media department at my job. I am specifically learning search engine optimization (SEO) and social marketing, so it is a hip new department to be a part of.

One of the problems with being part of emerging media is people often hear very little about the subject but have been told they NEED to be a part of this new and exciting marketing technique. The problem here is that social marketing does not work for everyone. The basic idea of social marketing is that you let your message spread virally through social networks, blogs, etc. That only works if you have something people want to talk about, and not every product or service is exciting enough to be considered newsworthy.

The hard part is convincing a client that their product or service, which they are generally passionate about, is not “cool” enough to spread socially. Nobody wants to hear that, and if you say it the wrong way you may lose their business altogether. This is even harder to deal with because of the mantra “The client is always right!”. As an agency our job is to please the client with the results they want to see, so if they specifically say they want to move into social media then darn it we better get them into every blog and network we can possibly find! While that would be an easy short term solution and would bring in more money to the agency up front, when (not if) the campaign fails, we as an agency will not look good and will have a hard time picking up repeat business. I am proud to say I work at an agency that prides themselves on their honesty about these types of things and hope all of our clients see the value in such honesty.

So we recently made the switch from Blogger, and it’s been quite the trip. It feels good to break free from the proprietary grips of Blogger, and into a clean, polished interface that is Wordpress. But with every new Wordpress installation, it becomes necessary to choose: which plugins will make the cut?

With such an active community that supports the Wordpress project, there are literally hundreds of plugins to choose from. It’s simple to customize every aspect of your blog, without writing any of your own code. So without further adieu, here are the ones that I’ve chosen to stick with:

Akismet

This one is pre-installed on every fresh Wordpress blog, and thank goodness for it. Akismet has become the de facto standard for catching comment spam in blogs. From their website, they say that 91% of all blog comments are spam. It works quietly behind the scenes so you never have to worry about it.

Overall Rating: 9.1 / 10

wp-cache

This is one of those plugins that you don’t realize you’ll need until it’s too late. Essentially it’s an extra layer of server-side caching, which saves bandwidth and speeds loading time under heavy traffic. It’s gotten some recent hype with sites like Digg and slashdot that bring in lots of traffic all at once. I haven’t noticed any difference yet, but this is another plugin that you can simply setup and forget about, and sleep a little easier at night.

Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10

All In One SEO Pack

Everyone knows that with having a blog now-a-days, it’s all about SEO. Although Wordpress already does a fairly good job of organizing your content, this plugin promises to optimize even further by automatically setting title tags and optimizing other meta data. This is a good start to get your page noticed by search engines like Google, but it’s by no means an end-all solution either. One of the other little features I enjoy about this plugin is its “One Click Upgrade” option– no more fussing with FTP every time there’s a new version out.

Overall Rating: 6.7 / 10

Google XML Sitemaps

This is another little charm that will help with getting your blog listed, and keeping those listing up-to-date. A sitemap is a file that lives in the top directory of your blog (generally “sitemap.xml”) that Google’s crawler uses as a cheat-sheet for indexing your page. Using a sitemap is highly stressed in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Not only will this plugin keep your sitemap prioritized and up-to-date automatically, but it’ll also notify Google and other search engines every time you post new content.

Overall Rating: 7.1 / 10

Flexible Upload

One aspect of Wordpress’ interface that I feel is lacking is their options for upload images for posts. They do have a simple box that will let you upload and insert, but your options from there are limited at best. With this plugin, you also have the ability to automatically create a smaller thumbnail image and resize the original while you upload. This is better than simply specifying a smaller size in the HTML, because it can reduce load times. Also, if you have an image-viewer plugin installed, such as LightBox, it integrates with those as well. The scope of this plugin is pretty narrow, but I feel it patches an important whole in the Wordpress editor.

Overall Rating: 7.6 / 10

(photo from flickr)

In a few days I am going to be switching gears at the advertising agency I work for and move into the interactive media department, specifically working on SEO for our various clients. Other than what I have read in passing over the last few years I know very little about SEO, so I’m sure it is going to be an informative and exciting journey into the new department.

As more and more software and services become free online through open source and web 2.0 methodologies, everyone from student programmers to CEO level business people are going to need to know how to make money off of what they provide for free. Advertising is going to be a great way to create a profitable business and still keep products and services free, and properly implemented SEO is one way to increase those profits.

I want to take this opportunity as I learn about SEO to share some of the intricacies and processes that I stumble upon and share them so the every day person can get a handle on just how much goes into achieving great search engine optimization. This should be a unique view into SEO since I am learning from scratch, so the information will be as interesting and new to the reader as it is to me.

Here’s to starting fresh in a brand new department and bringing you along for the ride!