You may think your site has only one homepage, but search engines may think otherwise. Open www.(yourdomain).com in a browser. Then, open up (yourdomain).com, sans the “www.” Did the second URL redirect to the first? If not, then you have a two-faced website on your hands! While this may sound cool, Two Face is an SEO villain that you need to conquer.

Why should I care? You will spread your “link juice” thin. Let’s take, for example, the homepage of yourdomain.com. Let’s say you have 10 sites linking into your homepage: 5 to yourdomain.com and 5 to www.yourdomain.com. Rather than your homepage receiving 10 ounces of “link juice,” each version of your homepage will only receive 5. This could have a substantial negative impact on your homepage’s PageRank and rankability in general.

How can I fix it? Fortunately, there is an easy fix via the .htaccess file. Add the following two lines (replacing yourdomain.com with your actual domain name):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The first line says, “look for yourdomain.com without a leading subdomain.” The second line says, “301 redirect the non-WWW version to the WWW version.” Simple as that.

Of course, any edit to your .htaccess file can have big implications, so make sure you test it out before you leave it up on the server. Generally, this edit doesn’t cause problems.

Now you can call yourself the Bruce Wayne of SEO.

Yahoo search marketing can prove to be a highly profitable means of reaching your target audience in search. Unfortunately, Yahoo’s campaign management interface is relatively unintuitive when compared to that of Google AdWords. To make the most of your PPC campaign, possessing a solid understanding of the tools you’re using is mission critical. That being said, let’s take a look at one of the less-than-intuitive points of the Yahoo tool: match type.

Yahoo offers two match types: Advanced and Standard, with Advanced being the default:

Unlike Google’s rather meaningful match type terminology (Broad, Phrase, Exact), “Advanced” and “Standard” don’t tell us much of anything at first glance. So what do they mean?

Yahoo’s Advanced match type is analogous to Google’s Broach match. Choose Advanced match and your ad will be displayed for variations of your keywords, including:

• Singular/plural variations
• Common misspellings
• Phrases containing your keyword
• Reordered versions of your multi-word keywords

Yahoo’s Standard match type is fairly similar to Google’s Exact match. However, Yahoo Standard will display your ads not just for your exact keywords, but also for singular/plural variations and common misspellings.

Which match type should you use? If you need tight control over what phrases display your ads, use Standard. If you only require loose control, you might try Advanced match + Excluded Words.

That’s Yahoo match types in a nutshell. For more information, check out Yahoo’s reference guide.

Mark your calendars for this Saturday, because there’s about to be a new wave of username squatting.  On June 13th, Facebook will roll out a feature which allows users to associate a username with their accounts.

Log into your Facebook account and you’ll most likely see this notification:

What exactly does this mean? The Facebook blog explains that users who choose a username will essentially gain a vanity URL for their profile pages.  Instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=28300932&ref=profile, my new profile link might be http://www.facebook.com/jordan.teague.

Why secure a username? Here are a few reasons to jump on the bandwagon.

1. Controlling/protecting your online identity.  If you’re a high-profile public figure, business person, or celebrity, snag your username before someone else does.  There are obvious problems that can otherwise ensue.  Twitter is a great example of a social media space with a lot of fakers who reserved well-known usernames early in the game.
2. Effectively marketing yourself or business on Facebook.  Take advantage of the opportunity to gain a vanity URL for your profile or your company’s profile.  The new vanity URLs will be much more memorable than the current URL format.  And memorable URL means more-likely-to-be-visited URL.
3. Search engine optimizing your Facebook profile.  Facebook public profiles already incorporate your first and last name into public profile URLs, but I imagine we’ll end up observing that the new vanity URLs trump the old format in terms of ranking (all other things being equal).

If you didn’t already mark June 13th on your calendar, do it now.  Especially you, John Smith!

So your site is ranking #1 for your industry’s top keyword?  You may be tempted to forget about SEO, but don’t be fooled: there is still plenty of work to be done!  In a few posts to follow I’ll review some activities you can perform on an ongoing basis to make the most of your SEO efforts.  One of these such activities is landing page optimization.

SEO tends to focus on increasing the quantity of traffic to a website.  Through landing page optimization–that is, making adjustments to key entry pages to improve the user experience–we can actually increase the value of the traffic gained through SEO.  Here’s how.

1. Identify your most popular landing page.  Start with baby steps and identify the landing page that attracts the most organic search traffic.  If you’re using Google Analytics, turn on the “Search Traffic” segment and view the “Landing Pages” report under “Content.”

Here’s an example from Searchability’s analytics.  Our blog article about Facebook ads is clearly our big winner.

2. Determine your audience’s intent.  The best place to start is by looking at the actual keywords/phrases that your visitors typed before they arrived at your page (in Google Analytics, it’s the “Keywords” report under “Traffic”).  Are they looking for an answer to a question?  Do they need a product or service?

In the case of our Searchability example, we see a number of keywords driving traffic to the landing page.  Interestingly, many of the keywords are formed as questions (i.e. “cpm or cpc on facebook?”).  Our audience is looking for advice on how to implement a successful Facebook ad campaign or improve their existing campaign.

3. Analyze your page.  Could your landing page offer a more complete solution to your visitor’s problem?  Could it more effectively encourage your visitors to become customers?

Back to our example: what if we modified our landing page to include a mention of Searchability’s social media management services?  While many of the article readers may intend to manage their own Facebook ad campaign, others may be overwhelmed after their research, and may ultimately prefer the idea of delegating their social media campaign to a specialist.

4. Implement and observe. Put some of your optimization ideas into action and observe whether they succeed.  For you, “success” could mean a number of things: less phone calls to customer support, more widgets sold, more Diggs.  It just depends on what your objectives are.

We’re working on practicing what we preach.  If you go to our article on Facebook ad bidding, you’ll notice that we’ve made a small change for the time being.  Once we can get it in the development queue, we plan on adding a form on this page, giving a reader the opportunity to contact us without even leaving the page.  Any ideas on other changes we might make to this page to better-promote our social media management services?

Make the most of your SEO investment; optimize your landing pages!

According to Wikipedia, Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. This is most commonly accomplished by making the site of interest appear in the first page of search results for specific keywords. After all, the higher a site appears in search, the more clicks it will theoretically receive; and if a site ranks for a relevant set of keywords, it should theoretically receive qualified traffic. Of course, building rankings for your website can take a substantial amount of time. As a supplement to your mainline SEO efforts, consider leveraging third party website rankings in driving traffic to your site and exposure for your company.

There are a number of third-party websites that allow the submission of user content, including social networking sites, user-submitted content sites, and product review sites, to name a few. For most of these sites, user-submitted content is search-indexable; if your content manages to rank, it can serve as a gateway to the ultimate destination, your company website.

I’ll give an example from my recent work with Song Manager. Song Manager is a relatively new web app designed for church service music planning. Since the brand name “Song Manager” contains generic keywords, ranking for the brand name was a slow-going process. By creating content on third party sites, we were able to get Song Manager faster search exposure. We created content on several sites including killerstartups.com, geeksandgod.com, facebook.com, and youtube.com. The pages on these sites ranked much faster than Song Manager’s website. And more important, these sites drove traffic to the main website in the absence of direct organic search traffic. (After a couple of months, Song Manager began ranking for its brand name)

Here are a couple of ideas on how you could make use of this technique:

• If you want search exposure for your name, create a LinkedIn profile.  Make sure to create a vanity URL!  Mine is www.linkedin.com/in/jordanteague.  Even if your name is common, there’s a good chance the LinkedIn directory page for your name will rank.
• If you want search exposure for your business, create a listing in Google local search and Yahoo local search.  More on this in another post to come soon.

If you’re interested in more ideas on how to construct a creative, effective SEO campaign for your business, contact me!

The old adage “be careful what you say, because someone might repeat it” would be better phrased these days as “be careful what you say, because someone might repeat it on the internet.”  Negative PR that makes it to the web can be immortalized in search results, forever tainting a person’s or company’s name.

One of the most interesting facets of SEO is reputation management–that is, attempting to push negative PR off the first pages of search results.  While a full-fledged reputation management campaign can be costly and time-intensive, you can take a small step toward managing your online reputation by creating a Google profile.

What is a Google profile? A Google profile is essentially an online resume, with information about your educational background, work history, and life experiences.  Take a look at my Google profile to see an example.

Why create a Google profile? If you’re one of the millions of John Smiths out there, perhaps you’ve experienced some disappointment when you’ve searched your name and found nothing about yourself.  Since Google profiles are eligible to be featured in search results, creating a profile may be a way for you to establish a presence in search engines.

How does a Google profile appear in search results? For the time being, Google seems to be displaying the profile listings at the bottom of page 1.  Here is how my profile appears:

Setting up a profile only takes a few minutes, so create yours today!

If you’re tired of waiting weeks for your websites to be crawled and listed in search engines, you don’t need more patience…you just need a better search engine submission method.

Chances are that one or both of the following items appear on your website post-launch checklist:

• Submitting your URL to Google/Yahoo/MSN via a URL submission form
• Submitting an XML site map to Google

Take those steps, and the search engines will find you…eventually.

But if you’d prefer being indexed in days, even hours, try this instead: submit your site to Digg (or another high-profile social bookmarking site).  Since the whole purpose of Digg is to allow users to find and share popular new destinations on the web, search engines are constantly crawling its pages in an effort to serve up relevant results to searchers.  And since your Digg submission will contain a link to your website, the search engine crawler will find its way to your site, too.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen this technique prove most effective with Google, with sites ranking for phrases within hours.

Over the past couple of weeks, President Obama has focused much of his administration’s energies on the mortgage foreclosure issue.  With interest rates at a historic low, millions of Americans now have the opportunity to refinance their mortgage and, in many cases, save hundreds of dollars a month.  Part of Obama’s strategy for encouraging more Americans to refinance is a website called makinghomeaffordable.gov.  If Obama’s web team does a little search engine optimization on this microsite, they’d be doing themselves a favor: just take a look at the recent search volume for “refinance mortgage” (in graph below).  The administration was certainly wise to reach out to people via the internet regarding the topic of refinancing.

Creating quality META tags may seem like a tedious task, but it’s a task that shouldn’t be neglected.  Here are three reasons why.

1. META Tags Are An SEO Tool.  Perhaps the most common context in which META tags are discussed these days is search engine optimization.  While META tags may not be the SEO silver bullet that they were years ago, they still play an important role in any search engine optimization strategy.  Search engines use these tags–in particular, the title tag–to help determine what phrases and keywords should return your site on a search results page.  So don’t forget to do your keyword research before you start cranking out META tags!
2. META Tags Form Your Search Engine Results Page Listing.  The title and description tag comprise a website’s listing on the search engine results page.  Use your title and description tags to differentiate your company from the competition.  Yes, use SEO-relevant keywords, but also use well-written copy that captures your company’s brand and accurately communicates what you have to offer.
3. META Tags Are Your Site’s Free Advertisement.  Not only do your META tags form your SERP, they often also serve as a mini-advertisement for your site.  For instance, when you share a website on a social network like Facebook, you’ll notice that the shared item normally contains a blurb about the site.  This comes straight from–you guessed it–the title and description tag!  Keep this in mind, and write compelling META tags that will move people to click.

It may not be fun, and it may not be easy, but writing killer META tags can go a long way in effectively promoting your site.

If you’re a Mac user and you haven’t tried Fluid yet, you’re missing out! Fluid is an application that turns any webpage into a standalone application, giving you convenient access to your favorite web apps via the Dock. Here are five great ways to use Fluid to free up a few browser tabs and make essential web applications more accessible.

1. Webmail. Turn your favorite webmail client into a standalone. Among other benefits, you won’t lose that long email you’re writing when your browser decides to crash.
2. Calendar. Fluid-ize your web-based calendar and make it one click away, so you can view and manage your schedule with lightning speed.
3. RSS Reader. Continue using your favorite web-based RSS reader while enjoying the conveniences of a desktop program–mainly, a Dock icon that displays how many unread posts are in your reader inbox.
4. Dictionary/Thesaurus. If you’re a meticulous wordsmith, you’re likely also a regular user of an online dictionary/thesaurus. By stanalone-ifying your online dictionary of choice, you’ll be able to easily alt-tab between your dictionary and your blog post draft (whereas these days you’re clicking between tabs in your browser).
5. Basecamp (or other project management apps). I’ve found that you get the most out of a project management app when you integrate it into your day-to-day rather than using it simply to organize details at the outset of a project. You’ll be all the more likely to do this if your app is accessible from the Dock.

I’d love to hear which web apps you’ve decided to convert into standalones. Leave a comment and let me know!

Download Fluid