For Small Businesses, hiring new employees is a big financial leap. The good news is, there’s a temporary relief for business who are contemplating new hires.
A new Act was signed March 18th, 2010; Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) which combines payroll forgiveness for Social Security taxes paid by employers on qualified new hires with a tax credit for keeping new hires on the payroll for at least 52 consecutive weeks.
What this means, the HIRE Act provides employers with an exemption from Social Security payroll taxes for every worker hired after Feb 3rd 2010, and before Jan 1st 2011, who have been unemployed for at least 60 days. Considering the benefits to the employer are tied to the 6.2% of any salary paid, a qualified worker may be hired for any number of hours, part time or full time.
In order to claim these benefits, the Employer will have to fill out a Form 941 revised, and begin on the second quarter filing. In addition, a Form W-11 will have to filled out by the employee for proof of his working terms within the time. These forms are not filed with the IRS, but retained with other income and payroll tax records. Make sure you hold onto them in case of an audit.
In addition, HIRE gives $1,000 income tax credit for every new employee retained for over 52 weeks. Granted, the employer will have to wait till 2011 tax returns are filed to benefit since it is a consecutive 52 weeks prerequisite.
Included within the HIRE Act, a bipartisan Senate Vote extended the Section 179 deductions of 2008 & 2009 expense thresholds so that small businesses can continue to write off ‘Eligible Property‘ of up to $250,000 with a phase-out of $800,000 till Dec 31st of this year 2010. So if you haven’t already gone Christmas shopping for your company, now’s the time.
If you have any further questions, you can follow the IRS likes listed:
Keyword Research – another oldie but goodie. To reap rewards from a good SEO campaign, you need to select powerful keyword that have high volume and are attainable in terms of rankings. Simultaneously, you can also search for “long tail” keywords that are highly targeted, even if they have very low volume. The traffic from long tail keywords have to convert at an extremely high ration. We see this all too often: people running high budget campaigns to websites that have not implemented appropriate keyword research and selection. This minimizes the benefits gained from a link popularity and SEO campaign.
In this article we will go back to basics again and give you detailed information on how to select profitable keywords for your website.
Finding Keyword Gold
The key to keyword research is finding keywords that have a high volume of search traffic with a low amount of competing pages. These are the “keyword gold” phrases that will lead to high rankings and targeted traffic. Trying to rank for keywords that have a high amount of competing pages may be completely ineffective as it may not be realistic for your site to rank for those keywords. For example, if you have a small dealership selling used cars in Valencia, CA – you will NOT want to try to compete for the keyword “used cars” – it is too competitive and there are too many “giants” competing for these terms. You would want to focus on targeted phrases like “used cars Valencia” or “used vehicles Valencia” as these are more attainable. Optimizing for keywords that are not attainable will only result in disappointment – you will waste your budget and efforts going after these keywords, and find yourself not ranking or receiving targeted traffic. So we recommend choosing keywords where you can realistically rank in the top 10, even if they have lower search volume.
So how do you determine these two factors? We’ll start by using Google’s Keyword Sandbox tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Establish Search Volume
Start by typing a keyword into this tool based on how you think your customers will find you. Be as detailed as possible. Also, it’s important to use “exact” in the “match type” column to get more accurate results. For example, start by typing in Used Cars into the keyword search box:
We typically recommend using the “global monthly search volume” column as it reflects more accurately general keyword search volume over time. This tool will tell you just how many people are searching for the phrases that are relevant to your website. Select keywords that are highly specific to your site/business – the more targeted, the better.
Click on “export to CSV for excel” so you can get these in a list.
You can then keep fine-tuning and adding other keywords that are increasingly relevant to your business / site. Search and export them all so you will create a comprehensive list of keywords. Once you have them all in excel, go through these keywords and select only the most relevant ones for your website/business, and delete all of the rest. These keywords will give you an idea of what people are searching for.
Establish Competition in Google
Then, go to Google and search for each of the keywords on your list, using the following qualifier: allintitle:keyword. At the top right, you will see the number of pages in Google’s database that contain this keyword in the title:
Enter in the number of competing pages into a new column in your excel sheet.
Determining Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)
Then, in a third column, create a formula where you divide the number of searches from the Google Keyword tool by the number of pages in Google. This will give you the Keyword Effectiveness Index for each of the keywords, or the KEI.
Once you have a number for each of the keywords, then you can look for the keywords that have the highest KEI – this indicates that they have high search volume with a low number of competing pages.
For example, if we were looking at the following 3 keywords:
Out of these keywords, the ideal keyword to go after would be “used cars sales”, as it has the highest KEI.
You can then sort your list from highest to lowest and that will help you get a better idea of which keywords are the most valuable keywords for you to target.
The disadvantages of using KEI as a measurement
Keep in mind, however, that this is a very broad method of searching for keywords and doesn’t take some critical aspects into consideration, such as the quality of the competition or the authority of the sites competing for those same keywords. For example, you may find a keyword that has a very high KEI and looks like it’s incredibly attainable. However, if you manually look at the sites and study their backlinks, you may find that they are very authoritative sites that will not be easy to compete with. Therefore, KEI should only be a “stepping stone” into your keyword selection process. The benefit is that you can have a better idea of what keywords may simply not be attainable and this step can be fundamental in “whittling” down your list.
Sometimes you can select the keywords simply by using common sense and intuition and the KEI measurement.
Combining KEI with Competitive Backlink Analysis
If you want to take keyword selection to another level, you will have to do some competitive analysis for each of the keywords. Our preferred method is the following:
Set up the SEO for Firefox application. Then search for your keywords in Google while the application is turned on. Once you get the results for all of the top 10 results, click on “export to CSV”.
Once we have these in excel, we then apply a formula to find the Average, Standard Deviation, and Median for the Yahoo backlinks of each of the keywords searched for. This will give you an idea of how competitive each of the keywords are based on the backlinks and/or any of the other data you wish to add from this report. It also helps you to gain an idea of the statistics for some of the sites that you will be competing with.
This is what the formulas look like:
Average: =AVERAGE(L2:L11)
Standard Deviation: =STDEV(L2:L11)
Median: =MEDIAN(L2:L11)
Once you have all of this data, enter it into your excel sheet. Your excel sheet will look like this:
Now, looking at this data tells a completely different story. If we were simply looking at KEI, we would’ve chosen “used cars sales” as the ideal keyword. However, once we look at the competition, we find that this keyword requires too many links in order to rank. If your site is new and/or has a low authority status and a low number of inbound links, this level of competition will be unattainable in the beginning. As your site gains authority status and you increase the number of backlinks, you can reconsider competing for keywords that have a higher competition level.
Consequently, this data indicates that the best keyword to select would be “Used cars Dealer”, as it has the lowest Yahoo links median. Although the traffic to that keyword is significantly less and there is a high number of competing pages in Google, those competing pages have low authority status and a low number of inbound links thus presenting a more attainable goal in terms of rankings.
Summary
Using this time consuming method, you can attain quantifiable data to help you select the best keywords to target for your market. After doing this for some time, you will develop an “eye” for this and may not need to do so much work.
If you want a much simpler, faster method, then please read Striking Keyword Gold:
http://www.authoritydomains.com/blogs/seo/striking-keyword-gold.php
This will give you a quick and easy way to find keywords to target. It will not be comprehensive but can help you find highly targeted and “available” keywords for your campaign.
Happy hunting!
Back to Basics
As we face a blank slate and think about what we want this year to look like, we like to make ambitious, complex New Year’s resolutions. But one thing I’ve learned through the years is that in order for complex to work, the basics have to be firmly in place. So today I am going to go back to basics when it comes to having an SEO friendly website. Yes, I know this is SEO 101 and for those of you who are old-time SEO’s, please forgive me. But sometimes it pays to go back to basics and even I will sometimes forget basic elements that can contribute to the success of a website. Without further ado, here is what I always look at when building or evaluating a site:
SEO friendly URL’s.
It is not always possible to include a keyword in the domain name, but if it is possible, it is very beneficial. Ever wonder why a site that has the keywords in the URL ranks above sites that have more and better links? If it is possible and makes sense and creates a brandable domain, try to include your keywords. If you are more interested in having a brandable domain or the keyword domain is not available, do your best to use keywords when naming the pages of your site. If you have a category page about Buttons, and the product pages is about Blue Buttons, then the URL’s should read /buttons/blue-buttons.php or something similar.
Incorporate Keywords into your Pages
The following are the areas where you always want to have keywords:
- Meta title
- Outbound anchor text
- At least once or twice in the body of text
- H1 and/or H2
- Page name (used in the navigation menu)
Having your keywords in these areas of the source code of each of your pages will tell Google what you want to rank for and will increase the density of that page for the particular keyword. I like to assign a Primary and a secondary keyword for each page that is used in the areas mentioned above. The primary keyword is the main phrase that I’m trying to rank for, and the secondary keyword is a semantically relevant phrase that supports the primary phrase. I like to create a site map in excel where I write out the URL of all of my pages, and then I assign a primary keyword, with that primary keyword I write the title of the page. In this way I can keep track of what words I’m using throughout the site and how often. Obviously this is only viable with a small site.
You also want to consider density. For example, if your primary keyword for a page is Blue Buttons, and your title is: BlueButtons.com is your premier source for blue buttons! The density for the keyword “blue buttons” will be close to 50%. In some cases where the keyword is competitive this may be perfect, in other cases it may be too high. Compare the density for your competitors and try to get your density to fall within the same range as your top ranking competitors. Each area has its own density, so you’re not looking for overall page density, you’re looking for meta title density, body text density, h1 density, bold density, etc. of a single keyword.
Dynamic site map & Google site map
Using some of the tools offered by Google or online, create an xml site map according to Google’s standards and upload it to your webmaster account. This will help get your site spidered and all of your pages indexed.
Additionally, create a dynamic site map with links to every page of your site using keywords in the link text. As new pages are created, the site map should update dynamically. Most large editorial sites using this protocol use the title of the page as the link text, which ideally will have been written with keywords in mind. If possible, the site map should be broken down so there are no more than 30 links per page. Then, all of the site map pages should interlink with each other. You may be wondering why you’d need a site map if you already have a Google site map uploaded to your Google Webmasters account? Creating an on-site site map creates another opportunity to support internal pages with links and to use keywords in anchor text for your internal pages, so it adds a little bit of extra punch to your SEO.
Anchor Text
This is one of the important areas where Google looks for keywords. Whenever possible, take the primary keyword for a page and link it to another page. For example, if your page is about the benefits of blue buttons, you should have the keyword “blue buttons” linked to another page on your site. Sometimes this gets tricky because the page you are on may be the only page on your site about blue buttons. In that case, you may want to link that keyword to the same page, although it may not be terribly usable. My workaround for this is to create a breadcrumb and then link the last link on the breadcrumb to itself. In any case, the key is to find something that makes sense, and it’s well worth it as this is something that Google really likes.
Pyramid Interlinkage
Determine your main categories and what pages go within each category, and try to interlink categories to categories and subpagese to subpages and categories. This way, every page is supported by links from internal pages relevant to the same topic. Based on the size of your site, if possible all main categories should link to each other in the template. This is a very complex topic and is very site-specific so I won’t waste a lot of time trying to explain; what I will stress is the important of not leaving “orphan pages” on your site – pages that have no inbound links from any other pages within or outside of your site. My rule of thumb is to make sure every single page of any site I work with has at least 2-3 inbound links from other pages within the site (including the site map).
301 redirects
If at any time you are switching domain names or changing a page’s URL, use 301 redirects to tell the engines where the new page is located. You can read more about this here: http://www.authoritydomains.com/blogs/seo/how-to-change-your-domain-without-the-pain.php
Also, check to see how Google has indexed your domain name, and if they have indexed both your www and non www version of you domain, do a redirect for the one that has the most pages indexed.
Footer
I’ll often use a footer as a way of including the primary keyword phrase in anchor text. Footers tend to be out of the way of the flow of the page so it’s a great way to add something that has SEO benefit but doesn’t disturb the user. If my site is about Blue Buttons, my footer will say: BlueButtons.com – where you can find blue buttons at affordable prices! It may also work as a way of having an additional set of text links, which is especially useful if you are using images for links as your main navigation.
Main Navigation
Ideally, your main navigation links should be spiderable. If you are using drop down menus, try to use div tags so the search engines can easily read your anchor text and links. Google is now spidering and indexing javascript so this is less important these days, but it is generally still simpler to use div tags.
Link Equity
The more links you have the less value each has, so be conscious of not adding too many outbound links while supporting the most important pages of the site. If you add links that have no SEO benefit, you may want to consider using rel=nofollow as part of the link.
Code
Keep your code clean! Use external JS and CSS - link to the file – not within the header. Also, keep the code to content ratio low – as much spiderable content as possible
Content Update Ratio
Try to add content often and on a regular rhythm. Don’t add 20 pages one day, and none for a month. It’s best to add a page a day. Establish a realistic content update ratio and try to maintain it. To find your ideal ratio, find out how often your top ranking competitors add content, and try to mimic their update ratio.
Optimize your Home Page!
This page has the most potential for rankings, so use it as much as possible with keyword friendly information and optimization. Of course it needs to be usable so you can’t just keyword stuff it, but try to add links to your most important pages from the home pages, as well as you rmost important keywords within the pages. Some suggestions that can help maximize the benefit of you rhome page:
a. Add a box with changeable content so has fresh spiderable content
b. Add as many keywords in anchor text as possible
c. Link to popular pages as well as pages that need a boost
Page Titles
Every page should have a unique page title. This is essential. Keywords in the meta title of the page is still one of the most important aspects of SEO. Never repeat the same title on more than one page of your site!!!
Conclusion
If you follow these basic principles, you will have a greater chance of establishing good search engine rankings. Of course all of this is worth nothing without quality inbound links. But having quality inbound links without good on-page SEO elements is also counterproductive. Very large authoritative sites may be able to get away with it, but if you are in smaller competitive niches, you need to cross all your T’s and dot all your I’s and following these simple elements will give you an advantage over other sites in your niche.
Once you’ve covered your bases, you will be free to work on other more important aspects of the development of your business.
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