If I were to ask you the question “What drives SEO success”, not specific to any client, and I was a CEO, how would you answer me?

Here’s my response:

If you steal it, at least give me some credit

SEO success is driven by several factors that evolve over time, most of which are well guarded secrets by the search engines.  Through years of experience, testing and research search marketers have identified key areas that lead to improved organic search engine visibility.  It’s nearly impossible to simplify a very complex puzzle but the corner pieces to the pentagon shaped puzzle are quality keyword research; optimized page titles, meta data, and site navigation; fully optimized images, videos and social media strategies; a well built (search friendly) site with high quality, focused, fresh content – all helping to attract inbound links to a variety of pages throughout the site.

Every morningwhen I wake up one of the first things I do is pick up my smartphone (currently a T-Mobile G1, previously a Blackberry Curve, before that a Palm Treo) and take a quick look at my e-mail.  My wife used to think this very odd.  Until several months ago I got her a Blackberry Curve – now she does the same thing.  E-mail on this phone, at least the e-mail I’m looking at is personal e-mail plus some of my many part-time business effort e-mails – none stunningly successful (or they wouldn’t be part-time) so not a ton of e-mail.  So in other words, not work e-mail.  Not e-mail from my real job (the one that pays the bills).  I’m not sure why I make this distinction it’s really not important.

Most mornings I have about 17-21 e-mails.  No big deal, about 1/2 are to be deleted, about 1/4 to be read later (maybe) and a few that I actually needed to look at first thing in the morning.  But this morning I had 48 e-mails waiting in my inbox.  This isn’t entirely unusual, it’s happened before – in fact in happened last year on this same day.  I just didn’t blog about it.  Usually when this happens I hope I had an explosion of sales on one of my websites thus a ton of payment confirmation e-mails, or something went viral and I have a bunch of new newsletter signups.   Neither has been the case yet.  I have had a few mornings with 12-18 new twitter followers for FantasyDraftEdge.com so that’s not a bad thing but most commonly the reason for an unusually high number of e-mails is a Woot Off since I get new Woot notifications via e-mail. 

But this morning I was bombarded with happy birthday e-mails from a variety of companies and forums.  
 An interesting concept in personalized marketing.  A pretty simple one too.  They know my birthday because I signed up and entered my DOB.  I ahd about 5 from forums (many of which I haven’t visited in a long while) that were plain text – one line, happy birthday from my forum, yada yada.  I did have a few with some decent value – at least perceived value.

Disney Movie Rewards gave me 25 points to my account just for having a birthday.  Not bad.  A feature length movie costs $15 – $18 on Amazon.com and gets you 100 points so this was about a $4 value.

EA Store offerred me 25% Off any purchase.  Pretty good on video games that go for around $50 and I do enjoy playing sports video games (I had just pre-ordered Tiger Woods 2010 for XBox 360) and my son loves Wii games (okay, so do I) so there is potetntial I will use this even if their shipping prices are kind of high and they ship slow.  Plus with 2 kids now I don’t play video games nearly as often.

AMCEntertainment gave me a free large soda.  Now the list value of this is huge – what are drinks at movies these days, $8?  Okay, not that much but still a nice gesture.  But, see above – 2 kids – I don’t go to the movies much anymore.  They aren’t quite old enough to enjoy (or be bearable) for movies so this one may not get used.

My Points gave me 5 free points plus 500 points just for spending $5 at a select merchant.  Pretty good deal.  Even though the merchant selection for this offer was not great I did buy a $5 gift card from Old Navy.  It won’t go to waste (my wife will see to it) and I get the points.  I should say that I did take a screen shot of the notice that said explicity “Gift Cards purchases eligible for Points” since I am suspicious and wonder if it was supposed to say not eligible.  Hopefully I get my bonus points and never need to bring this up since I’ll probably lose the argument if they don’t give me points.

Plus I had gotten 2 e-mails previously from birthday clubs.  One was Houlihan’s restaurant, a free entree.  So that’s an $8 – $15 value for lunch, maybe twice that for dinner.  Of course they know I’ll spend at least that much with my guests plus I’ll pay $1.69 for 30 cents worth of lemonade. 

Also earlier in the week The Melting Pot sent me a free chocolate desert with the purchase on entree.  The Metling Pot is AMAZING, but expensive so I won’t probably use this one as we go about once a year for our anniversary or Christmas gift to ourselves.

Lastly, Dave and Busters sent me an email coupon for $10 in free tokens – just for showing up.  Not bad at all since I actually won’t drink if I go (which I’m sure they expect me to to make some money on the offer) or buy dinner (the food is over priced and under good).

Plus I got 2 e-cards and a few other direct personalized e-mails from friends with birthday wishes a few have wished me happy birthday via Facebook.

Ironically, one of my extra full inbox e-mails this morning was an offer for free travel when I join AARP.  It’s funnier when you know I haven’t hit 40….YET.   It was just spam, not bad marketing.

During the day I’ve gotten a few other similar marketing e-mails wishing me a happy day.

So my point is this – did these e-mails work?  Was this good marketing?  In some instances it was very cheap and easy.  No offer, clearly automated and no work on any graphics or anything (plain text e-mail).  Others have some value, some more than others, but none are exceptionally pricey.  No better than a deal I’d get anyway for some other reason perhaps – or a coupon in the paper.  But still, it was a gesture and even cynical old (now a year older, but not an AARP member yet) me thought it was nice – even if I did delete most of them pretty quickly.  I did just write a blog post and gave them all a link (well, the best ones)!

The bottom line is this – why not do this for your clients if you have the ability through your CMS or database.  Although as I said some were better than others and some intruigued me more than others not once did I get mad and think – I’m never going to that website or business again!  Curse them for wishing me a happy birthday!  It was a cheap and easy way to reach out to a customer in an effort build loyalty.  Good plan in my opinion.

First, what happens at least a few days a week in front of where my office…it probably happens more but I see it a few times:
There’s a long stretch of a state highway that feeds into downtown from an area of town that has really grown the past several years so what was once kind of a nifty shortcut into downtown away from the Interstates is now a major artery into the city and traffic can back up quickly as it ends at a stop light at the edge of the city.
Since this road crosses the river there are little opportunities to get off and bail out when traffic gets particularly bad.  The only exception (2 actually) is access to a frontage road (access road, service road) that is a public road and allows you to zoom along side the highway for a few miles and then remerge into the same traffic.  So basically you can be a weasel and cut ahead of a mile or so of traffic.  I hate people like that.   So as I come from the opposite direction daily seeing this stream of weasels I think to myself – I hope there is in fact such a thing as Karma and I hope they get what they deserve someday – whatever that may be…

So how do I related this to SEO?  Those people are taking shortcuts.  Technically they aren’t doing anything illegal.  It’s a public road they are using, and they aren’t speeding (well, I’m sure some are but that goes to my point – taking chances), they aren’t driving over the median or jumping a curb, slamming into other cars to get back into the traffic, etc…
But they are certainly treading a fine line of moral behavior?  One could say (like me) that it’s a rude or cheezy thing to do.  Why are these people better than the rest of us?  Sit in traffic like the rest of us and we’ll all get there soon enough.  Instead they ‘cheat’ and move up in traffic – ironically causing the overall traffic to slow down since now there is a line of cars merging back into traffic.
So as your website sits and patiently waits for your hard work on fundamental, white hat SEO to pay off otherwise are taking shortcuts and then trying to get back in line with the rest of us.  They’re possibly taking chances but not technically breaking any rules.  So do you believe in Karma?  Do you believe that by playing by the rules and doing the right thing you’ll be rewarded in the long run and those taking shortcuts and tiptoeing a lot closer to the “line” perhaps crossing it now and then will eventually get caught and punished (Karma)?

You decide.

And just because I like saying it – PurpleWidget.com is still the # 1 result on Google for the search term “purple widget”

The site started from the ground up – new domain name and all in the fall of 2007.  It’s built on an e-comm software package that does an OK job of automating SEO but far from great and offers no manual editing of page titles, meta tags on product pages.  And changing landing pages takes some HTML coding knowledge and getting under the hood.  And since the owner of the site – a one man show – has no ability to do this himself my ability to do a lot of this coding helped out.  But still, I was facing (and still face) some challenges from the software.  But we shall overcome. 

He had no real SEO on the site for the first several months and was literally selling nothing.  Tens of thousand of dollars to get the site designed and set up – no sales.  Nowhere to go but up.  And, by the way he had no budget for SEO.  About 4 hours a month for several months (and that including doing a lot of the work with some coding rather than just data entry for key areas of the site) – then even less.  That’s part of the reason that this process may seem slow – it was far from an all out full-time effort but it was certainly better than nothing.

I won’t go into extensive details about every step that was done but it started with keyword research of course so the best phrases were being targeted.  The next focus was on creating some landing pages and adding some text to the dynamic category pages of an e-comm site.  Some improved internal linking with good anchor text put in where appropriate.  Next some attention was paid to how product names were entered and how category names were sculpted – with the limitations of the e-comm software these naming conventions were important (this is pretty standard with e-comm sites).  We then worked to improve the product descriptions of individual product pages – the site can still do a much better job of this but one area of weakness for many e-comm sites is lack of content on product pages so this is a chance to set this site apart from the competition.  Link building has been a part of the process as well as I’ve found industry specific blogs and attempted to at least exchange links (oh no – not link exchanges…..I know, I know but they still have some value if done well and done in moderation) if not get one way links.  I submitted to several decent directories early in the process – not sure I’d focus as much on this now but remember this site did not exist less than 2 years ago – directories provide one-way links.

So what has all this led to?  Slowly but surely traffic has increased, links have increased (more exposure brings more exposure!), and most importantly conversions have increased quite a bit!

I’ll start with the most important analytics – sales!  Remember, 6 months $0 sales when the site launched.  In the last 6 weeks (as of this posting of course) the site has generated over $5k in sales – and the owner notes that HALF of his sales start on the website and end with a phone call that analytics doesn’t capture.  My advice of the big phone number on every page of the site certainly makes sense now!  I’ve talked to him about capturing those sales in analytics but for a variety of reasons, he’s not interested.  But just know that the dollar values I discuss here are only about 50% of his sales right now!

So again, from no sales the first 6 months of existence the last 6 months (which of course includes x-mas sales) website analytics saw nearly $14k in sales!  So that $5k the last 6 weeks actually is more impressive now!  So sales are finally going well!

Now for the more SEO analytics type stats that us SEO Marketing geeks like:

First I’ll compare Jan 1 – Feb 15 ‘09 to July 1 – Aug 15 ‘08
(6 week periods that don’t include X-Mas)
And all stats are of coures non-paid keywords:

Conversions +26%
Total Transactions +125%
Total Products Sold +196%
So not only are we seeing more traffic, we’re seeing better traffic!

Same periods compared – sales that started with a Google search UP 213% in terms of revenue and up 87% with Yahoo! traffic.

Search engine traffic is up 17% – perhaps the least impressive number but let’s look at another number now.

Compare the first 6 weeks of 2009 to the first 6 weeks of 2008.  Year to date comparissions:

Visits up 83% Overall
Search engine traffic up 31% 
Google Traffic up 292%
Yahoo Traffic up 108%

So – as is often a question on Purple Widget – what’s my point?

Simple: SEO Works
It may work slowly when the budget is limited, and your website software is far from ideal but it does work.  Have patience and keep working on it – SEO does work!

Recently, and perhaps with more to come in the future in the face of global economic concerns I’ve gotten (or seen) e-mails from companies promoting themselves as competitors have failed or changed services.

These marketing efforts have dual impact.  One, they provide news to customers – maybe you didn’t know company X no longer did Y.  And they offer a solution.  Since X no longer can do Y for you, let us do it!  Taking it even another step a coupon or discount of somekind goes even further…try us and save 15% for example.

The two that come to mind from my recent inbox are Staples and FedEx.

It seems, and I did not know this until I got this e-mail, Office Depot is closing 112 stores – the e-mail had the story in it!  Staples is making me aware of this and reminding me I can always count on Staples.  No specifc offer but very clear links to find a store and about their benefits of free delivery and their rewards program among others.  

I have also gotten several e-mails from FedEx reminding and informing me of changes at DHL. 
The first e-mail I got started with:

It’s official: DHL is discontinuing its U.S. domestic-only air and ground services. If you’ve been shipping with DHL, chooseFedEx to make the transition as smooth as possible for you, your suppliers and your customers.

DHL has cancelled its money-back guarantee for international shipments to the U.S.

But FedEx Express still offers a money-back guarantee on international shipments if we miss our published (or quoted, as in the case of FedEx® International Next Flight) delivery time by even 60 seconds*.

  I received two other e-mails after this that reminded me and offered links to FedEx.com to promote what they can offer me.  I never got any such e-mail from UPS.  Did FedEx do any PPC for searches around DHL job cuts or DHL stopping service, etc…?  I don’t know the answer but I bet it wouldn’t have been very expensive to do so.

How does this tie back to SEO?  Well, I’m talking about on the web and I’ve linked to these companies.  Many other likely are as well.

Opportunities are everywhere – don’t miss them.