Companies will pay big bucks to learn more about you, and service providers on the web are eager to get their hands on as much information about you as possible. So what do you do? How do you keep your information out of everyone else’s hands? Here’s a guide to surfing the web while keeping your privacy intact.

It used to be that a good ranking on the right terms was the absolute best way to get good leads. It is still a strong source of those leads but it isn’t the only game in town. Internet marketing looks at many more facets of generating traffic. It looks at online advertising, local search, social media, and yes even email.

I spend a lot of time listening, analyzing, determining, and executing the best internet strategy for each company I consult. At the end of the day, I will even tell my clients if they’d be better off using the guy in the monkey suit.

Link building builds votes and endorsements for your site. When we build links, we contact other websites to gain links back to your website. Sometimes this is accomplished by making comments to law related content on other websites, sometimes by offering content to other websites in exchange for links back, other times it is creating and posting content among properties we own to build conversations about your services.

An example in the non-internet world would be: When we are looking for a good attorney we look in the phone book, we look at billboard, commercials, and we ask people their opinion. From that research, the attorney that appears most relevant to our needs is the one that goes to the top of our list. These are the attorneys we are going to call.

In the internet world, better relevancy to the searchers search query means higher ranking on the search page.

One of the ways that search engines determine the relevancy of a web page is through link analysis. The search engine examines other sites that link to your site,  the text of the link , the content of both your page and the site linking to your site, and they look at other sites linking to the one linking to yours; all to determine relevancy. So the site with many relevant links that meet the criteria the search engine determines is best for high ranking will show up higher in the search results.The best site or the best attorney is not the one that ends up on the top of the search listing page; it’s the one with the site that is best structured and the one that has the best links. If someone is searching Farmville Attorney, it’s important that your site has links pointing to it from relevant sites that talk about attorneys, law, etc. The reality is that not very many people are going to link to an attorney site so we have to encourage other sites to naturally linked to your site from their sites. That is where a link builder comes in. We ask other sites to link to yours. By creating good articles, blog posts, etc. that can be leveraged to other sites that need content; we can exchange content for a link. Because they are so vital to high rankings, links have become a form of currency on the internet. There are many other tasks a link builder performs including writing and distributing press releases, researching viable sites to ask for links, creating “link bait” which can cause viral linking, placing blog posts with correct and appropriate links, searching for useable and legitimate local and regional directories that will link back. The list is longer than this, but you should ge the picture. If you don’t, email me, or give me a call, to discuss.

Google announced they are rolling out a new search algorithm change that helps make the search results “fresher.” The big news here is that besides for the results being fresher, the results will change for about 35% of all searches. MORE

Google makes money by people coming back and using their search product. If they use it there is a good chance they will click on ads. Google make billions of dollars from their search ads. It stands to reason that they want to give their searchers the best results possible so they keep coming back. Google search results mean good quality results. How many times have you searched for some term and ended up sifting through several less than stellar sites? I do it day in and day out. What is quality?

You can read a hundred posts on what to do about Panda. I can boil it down to this: eliminate duplicate content and thin content. If you have pages that are exactly the same as twenty other sites on the web then you have a problem. I guarantee if you have a e-commerce site that sells the same thin as other sites, you have duplicate content. That is, unless you took the time to change the descriptions and make them unique to your site. Thin content is all the crummy pages out there that have about 100 words on them and they tell you nothing. They are normally laden with ads and tons of links pointing away from the page.

Make sure you are delivering a quality site. Google says that Panda is just one of five hundred search “improvements” they plan to roll out. I loved these word from Google. I’ve been telling people for a long time to think the way Google thinks.

if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we’ve been looking at the issue:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?

See more here.

If you have search terms that have lost a lot of ground in Google and you have no idea why, talk to a professional search engine optimizer. They can help.

Market Analysis

Their Initial Key-phrases – “Business Presentations”, “PowerPoint Presentations”

• Too generic, doesn’t bring in targeted traffic, too much competition
  • Narrow your focus
  • Pick more specific key-phrases – use a keyword tool to determine the number of searches done daily.

Refined Key-phrases – “PowerPoint business presentations” (~60 per day), “business presentation templates” (~45 per day), “business presentations PowerPoint templates.” A lot less searches but much more focused. You will need to dig into and generate many more of these. Do some research on long tail key-words. Generate more ideas. Get very specific with your categories: “health and safety PowerPoint presentations”, “medical tourism PowerPoint presentations”, etc. Use a key-word discovery tool and type in “PowerPoint templates”, “business templates”, “PowerPoint business presentations”, etc and start to create a list of potential phrases.

• Much lower traffic but much more targeted, less competition

Home Page

• Tags  – What is the main emphasis
  • Change tag to PowerPoint Presentation Templates | Pure Presentations
  • Change description to “selling copy” that will entice a searcher into your site. Limit to 160 characters
• Copy – Emphasis on 1-2 main topics of the site
  • Use H1 to title your main emphasized key-phrase on this page
  • Include the phrase in the copy a few times. Don’t worry about density etc, just sell your company and the product.

Navigation

• Determine the emphasized areas/products
  • If we use my examples above – Create a navigation structure that emphasizes the main categories you decide to go after. “Template” may be close but “PowerPoint Templates” is better and in your case “Business PowerPoint Templates” is probably even better. I see “End to End” and “Design & Build” as main categories in the site navigation. I assure you very few people search for “End to end” and if they are searching for “Design & Build” it is not in reference to templates. Use navigation buttons that more define what your potential client will search for: Maybe they should say – “business presentation templates”, “reformat PowerPoint presentation”, “PowerPoint Consultants” etc. You don’t have to make the graphics on the button say all that but make sure you use it in the alt text at the very least. Then emphasize on the page with the title, description, H1 or Srong, and page copy.
    • Replace “End to End” with “PowerPoint Consultants.” “PowerPoint Consultants” has very few searches per day but “End to End” has none.

Internal Pages

• Change Templates page to “PowerPoint Business Templates”
  • Change Title, Description, H1 or Bold, and Copy to emphasis this term
• Change Communication page (under templates) to PowerPoint Communications
• Change End to End to PowerPoint Consultation
• Etc.

When you are done with this process you should have a site with navigation to 3 main topic areas that have targeted search. You will also have a contact us, clients (wait, I would probably change this to testimonials and put some on the page. People will figure out that testimonials come from clients. You boiler plate client page does nothing for you and certainly doesn’t give the searcher anything of value)

You are currently using a lot of flash that never stops moving. Get rid of the moving stuff, 3 slides that change is my normal limit.

On Going Analysis

Now it get’s fun. I see you have analytics on the site. Use them. Are the new, more specific, terms you’ve selected from the process above working? Are they and the site sticky? Are people calling? Etc. Create a feedback loop that is very critical of your work. Decide what works and what doesn’t. Refine. Rinse and Repeat.

You will need links to your site. You have somewhere around 8. Your competitors for the refined terms I’ve used above have anywhere from 800 to 15,000. Link building is a lot of work and does take some knowledge to make sure you are getting the best links possible for your money. I’d suggest hiring it out but that is up to you.

If you want to speed up the test process use some pay-per-click targeting phrases and measure what works. Throw this analysis back into your organic process.

If you have the money, get complete Site Optimization Audit now and let a pro do the work for you. You will start off with a much better base to your marketing/site pyramid.

The good and bad in my opinion: It takes the keyword issues out of play in the url display and focuses more on the brand. At the same time, it removes a potential filter for the searcher to find what they are looking for. I’m sure there will be much more in depth discussion form other sources in the days to come.