Just before the new year, we launched a brand new website that showcases our web design portfolio, case studies and new web services. Our capabilities have expanded in the last year or so, and now include a greater focus on advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Inbound Marketing, using social media, social bookmarking, blogs, RSS feeds and more. I’ll get back to SEO in a moment though…
As the host of a popular podcast show called Holistic Health & Wellness, I am privileged to interview many well known gurus on natural health, wellness and spirituality. Tonight I have the pleasure of interviewing a cross-over guest, James Connor. He’s a cross-over for me because Liqui-Site have worked with his branding agency in NYC, The James Group, and now he’s appearing on Holistic Health & Wellness to talk about his book and his upcoming Buddhist retreat. In order to journey into the Arizona desert for 3 years, 3 months and 3 days of silence, James had to give up all his worldly possessions – including The James Group. It makes for a great conversation! So, if you’re interested in listening to the show, it begins airing on January 28, 2010.
The SEO tie-in is that in James Connor’s book,The Perfection of Marketing, there’s a chapter that everyone needs to read – if not the entire book. Chapter 12 is called Building Websites For Search Engine Placement. Connor himself admits that The James Group didn’t focus on best practices in SEO until 2006. Since then, they’ve identified fact from fiction and kept up-to-date with Google’s algorithm changes. At Liqui-Site, we’ve become experts in this area as well over the last few years, but I personally took two bits of information from Connor’s book that will help in Liqui-Site’s SEO tactics for future client sites as well.
(1) In Yahoo, you can view how many inbound links your competitor’s site has (which is an insight into popularity of course) by typing the following into the engine: link:http://www.thecompetitorsite.com. We use Alexa.com to determine this information, but with so many people using Yahoo! as a search engine, it’s nice to know that this kind of information can easily be ascertained by clients themselves.
(2) About 40% of your ranking comes from what you do on your website, and about 60% comes from what you do off your website. I was actually under the impression that it was closer to 50/50, but this is a great rule of thumb to abide by when developing inbound marketing strategies for/with our website design clients.
I strongly believe that one person (or one company, in this case) can never know every single thing about their area of expertise. The most innovative, cutting-edge web development firm in the world knows there’s always something more to learn about SEO. As Connor puts it, “it’s an arms race, and it’s important to pick which search term battles you want to fight.”
