Google says that there are 151,000,000 searches a month for the word “car.” Question…Is it more important to therefore try to rank organically for the word “car,” to try and capture traffic from those hundreds of millions of searches and compete against every other website going after “car” searches? Or should you focus your efforts on other more specific keywords that are more relevant to your brand and you have greater potential to rank for?

Below are some thoughts and questions you should ask yourself about keywords when you are building a site, adding a page, or even naming a product:

1. Just because you call your product something, doesn’t mean that a consumer is searching for your product that way
   • A car can be searched for many different ways: sedan, coupe, Ferrari, sports car, two door sedan, red car, best sports car, which car is better, Ferrari that was in Ferris Bueller’s Day off

   When trying to find keywords for your site, make sure that the keywords make sense for your brand and what the product actually is; this will help them rank better in the long run.

2. Make sure to check out how competitive the search landscape is
   • If you are a smaller website, it might be better to focus less on the broad, very high traffic keyword “cars” and put more effort into the “red four-door sedan” keyword which doesn’t have big companies competing for that space.

   Just because consumers conduct 1,000,000 searches a month for a specific keyword, doesn’t mean you will get any traffic from it, if you are not ranking on the first page or second page of the results. So do your competitive landscape analysis and find the right keyword.

3. Map Your Keywords across your site
   • Why cannibalize your own keywords? Find unique keywords per page that you can optimize and have the possibility of ranking for all of them

   Make sure to focus each page to two or three specific keywords and use each keyword two to three times in the content.


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Making sure that your website has links from other websites is a very important aspect of SEO. Although link building can sometimes be a very slow and very gradual process, the increase in traffic and visibility that results from meaningful links is a great reward.

As an intern looking to learn the ins and outs of SEO, I sought to find out more about some of the different link building practices and strategies out there. When it comes to SEO, things are constantly changing, so it’s important to continuously keep up to date with the latest news about which link building practices work and which don’t. Here are some great link building tips and strategies that stood out to me:

Create “Link-Bait”: It’s all about good content! Create articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, etc. that are well-researched and provide extremely interesting, educational or entertaining content. If you can establish your site to be one of the best resources in a given market space, people will surely link to it.

Guest Post On Other Sites: Find other bloggers in your industry and ask them if you can write a guest post for their site. Blogs are always hungry for fresh content and there are many blogs out there that accept guest posts. This is a great way to get a link back to your own site, build personal brand visibility, and start becoming a part of the community within your market space.

Conduct Interviews: Interview someone in your industry. Some people love to talk about themselves. You’ll raise exposure for your site through the interview and hopefully generate some favorable links or mentions from the person that you interviewed.

(For more of the latest articles on link building tips and strategies, check out this list of 79 Link Building Resources by KISSmetrics)
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What the H!@# is a Canonical Tag? First off, it is pronounced [kuh-non-i-kuhl] tag and it helps eliminate duplicate content on your site in the eyes of search engines. It is easy to implement, accepted by all the major search engines and can help your site in the rankings.

In its simplest form, a canonical tag tells the search engines which page to display in place of similar pages (like a 301 redirect), but without actually redirecting the user to the new page. When there are multiple versions of the same page/URL (example.com, www.example.com, www.example.com/) they are all considered the same in the eyes of the engines, which means the engines don’t know which URL to display in their indexes. This in turn can affect your pages’ search engine rankings and traffic to your site (something no one wants).

To prevent your site from potentially losing rankings and positions, simply add a canonical tag to the duplicate pages. Like other meta attributes, it is added in the <head> of your page’s code. You will want to add the canonical tag to all of the duplicate pages, but not the preferred page’s URL. Here is an example of code that will be added to the duplicate pages that you will not want indexed:

Add <link rel=”canonical” href=” www.example.com> inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:

• http://www.example.com/
• example.com/
• www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com

And by adding that simple line of code into the header of the duplicate pages, the search engines will understand that the duplicate pages all should be pointed to the preferred canonical URL. You can check your site’s duplicate content by going into Webmaster Tools and adding in canonical tags where appropriate. With these simple instructions and examples, start adding your own canonical tag today!
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If you haven’t heard the latest news, Google has released their brand new Television/ Internet viewing 1-2 punch, so cleverly dubbed: Google TV. Here’s a little video courtesy of Google for a little run-down of Google TV’s features and functionality.

What is Google TV?

Pretty cool, right? So basically what Google TV does is seamlessly integrates the internet and your television together as one, to provide you with the ultimate viewing experience right from your couch.

Why optimize for TV?

As new platforms continue to emerge, we find ourselves constantly adjusting so we can provide our users with the best experience possible. Just as more people are releasing mobile versions of their site for all those users accessing the internet from their mobile phone, it may now be just as important to start optimizing your site for TV as well.

Since Google TV has a full web browser already built in, almost every site that currently exists should already work. But to provide the user with the best TV experience, you might want to create what Google calls a “10-foot User Interface” version of your site. Seeing as Google TV users will be viewing the website from their couch about ten feet away (instead of inches), and (instead of a mouse) they will be using a remote and a keyboard, it is very important that they are able to navigate through your website easily, and actually be able to see what they are navigating through from 10 feet away. (Simplicity is key here)

Some basic steps to optimize your site for TV.

Google recommends:
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1. Make sure that your text is large enough to easily be read from a long distance (around 21pt on 720p and 28pt on 1080p)

So. You and the team have worked real hard, impressed the bosses with a little brand refresh, you’re feeling real good about the new look. Now you’re about to launch a bright, shiny, new website, you’re hoping for a promotion… Because if you build it they will come, right? Um…No.

This question is one we at EIM get asked, well sometimes daily! Many of our clients have been with us for a long time, long enough that we work on their second, or even third website refresh with them (because as you should know, a website refresh every few years is typically a must!). The first time we worked on their site, SEO probably wasn’t a huge priority. Now? Well 99% of the time it’s a must-have. I mean, most websites are built with the goal of growing a business and increasing sales, right? Unless you are one of those businesses that is so busy you don’t want or need additional sales, then read on for WHY your new site needs a search engine optimization strategy.

1. It’s where your customers are. I shouldn’t need to explain this one much, it’s just a reminder. Search is huge. Your customers are most likely searching online for you, no matter what phase of the buying cycle they are in – Interest, Research, or Buying. Don’t you want to make sure when they do a search for your brand name, or your service and products, that you have a presence in the search engines?
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Once the year starts winding down and the months begin to get closer to the holiday season, there’s one thing lurking in the back of everyone’s mind (whether they like it or not), and that one thing is, you guessed it, shopping for the holidays. The feeling of the season-of-giving creeping up might give you a warm tingly feeling inside, or on the other hand completely stress you out. But in the end, the bitter realization is, that when this time comes around people will be spending money, and lots of it (no matter the state of the economy).  The big difference these days is (with the economy in its current state), consumers are going to use every resource possible to find the best deal out there.

Although lots of people still do their shopping in stores, there is one resource that almost everyone utilizes. Yep, you said it, the Internet! I know this is a big surprise to everyone, but the important thing to focus on isn’t the fact that people use the Internet to do their shopping, but HOW they use it to shop.

There are a cornucopia of different resources (blogs, social networks, email services, rewards & directories, cross-shopping) that can be used to find information about products/deals, but one resource that single-handedly dominates all of them is, search engines. Take a peak at this graph from Hitwise -

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