Monday, April 04, 2011

Magazine Publishers Lose Focus on SEO and See Revenues Drop


With all the buzz about social media, many publishers are losing focus on search engine optimization (SEO) and the cumulative effect of this distraction will be reduced traffic and reduced revenue due to dropping search engine rankings. Many publishers and web masters think they know how to create SEO success for their publication web site and are amazed when we run them through our 10 point SEO check up and reveal they are losing ground, losing rankings and thus soon to lose revenue.  A recent publisher told me they were #1 when you typed their magazine name in Google.  Is this how you are gauging your SEO success?  Another publisher, suffering from a major plateau in web traffic, was amazed to learn than only 20 searches were done in the last 30 days for the topic they presented very well online.  We made one small tweak to how they were presenting their topic online and their web traffic grew 345% in 30 days!

The beauty of the web is also its worst nightmare for publishers as a one-person website from a garage, with excellent SEO, sinks its teeth into your web traffic.  Your goal should be to create more unique visitors to your website than the circulation of your magazine.  It is at this point that publishers begin to see significant revenue from their web presence online.  To that end, you need to create the perfect SEO plan to drive maximum traffic.  There is no more perfect way than proper SEO.
Let’s discuss three factors we have found to be most important in regards to SEO success after optimizing hundreds of web pages for publishers.
First, site structure in relationship to key search terms. What are users searching for and then how is your site set up to deliver back relevant results for those terms.  For example, you are a website about parenting advice.  You have optimized your pages for the term, but when a user gets to the site, do you present your site so that parenting advice is the menu, the navigation, the section, the pictures, the videos and the final thought the Google bot remembers when they leave your site?  All in all, you need to follow what Google has said from day one, if you want great SEO rankings, build a great site that is easy to navigate and clearly promotes your topic set.
Second, what are you doing on a monthly basis to create “chatter” for your website in relationship to your key terms and key phrases?  Facebook and Twitter are not enough to create the “chatter” needed to get you noticed.  “Chatter” is often defined as the overall popularity you have online.  Meaning, how often are people online talking about you, your magazine and, most importantly, your key terms?  The mechanisms to create effective “chatter” are vast and deep.  This type of organic cheerleading must be an important part of your plan for SEO success and it must happen daily.
Third, deep links and the trust factor.  We have found deep linking to be vital to your overall SEO success.  Deep links are links to pages on your site beyond the main page.  In this same topic is the search engine friendly structure of your page names.  Creating links from external sources is great, but creating links to pages deep in your site has been found to add some serious boost to your efforts especially when the structure of your page URL incorporates all we have mentioned above in this article.  These deep links will also dramatically affect how the search engines trust your site. Websites with a ton of deep links from “trusted” websites almost always fare better in the rankings.  There is no definition for what constitutes a “trusted” web site, but we have found that other media sites, sites with .org and .edu in their name and sites that have been online a long time seem to be more trusted than others
Of course, we all know there are more than three things you need to do to be a success with SEO online.  But, the first step as a publisher is often the hardest… realizing that you just might need some help with SEO.  The very best webmasters can often miss some important marks in shooting towards SEO success.  If you do not create the perfect SEO scenario, someone else will and then they will win the game.
Ready for an SEO check up?  Brain Swell Media offers you a 10 point review in less than 30 minutes at no cost to you.  We will then present you a plan to fix, grow and make money from your website.  Contact us today.

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