I know I promised you the third installment of SEO management. If you need a refresher, you can head back to Part I and Part II.

It’s been a busy week – right up until my time on RSS Ray’s radio show on Wednesday to talk about email marketing.

So finally, here it is, the one thing you absolutely must manage when it comes to SEO…and that is – trust.

Now, maybe you’re out there saying, “Tony, people trust me. They like me and they visit my site, and buy from me. Why should I be so concerned with trust?”

With those people, you’ve already built trust. You job with them is to maintain it. Much of what we’ll go over covers both building and maintaining that trust. So keep reading.

The trust I’m mainly talking about is the kind that you need from first-time and new-er visitors as well as from the search engines that can hold the key to your success (and failure) online. We’ll deal with one a time.

Trust and first-time/new users

Trust can be built, or lost, even before visitors come to your site. The good news is that you do have some control over it.

For example, when a page from your website is returned as a search result, people make an initial judgment about that result. They read the title, the meta description and look at the URL.

With those three small pieces of info, users decide that they either trust you enough to click through and see what happens, or that they can’t trust you enough and go searching for a result that meets their requirements.

Some keys to offering trust (or avoiding distrust) with first-time and new users is to:

• Have well-written page titles that accurately describe what a visitor will find on each page. Try to keep them within readable character counts, and if you must go over a character count, have the most important information at the beginning of the title.
• Write meta descriptions that support your page titles. Again, stay within character counts and use the space to build rapport, describe in further detail what your page is about and add a call-to-action if needed.
• If possible, keep your URLs as simple as possible (while being mindful of your SEO efforts) and use the URLs to describe their pages. With e-commerce sites, this isn’t always easy, but if you can keep a URL short and descriptive, it can add a little more trust – or at least not create any distrust with your users.
• Once users have clicked through to your site, they must be met with the information you promised in the three items above. If not, you will lose trust and your visitor will make the move for their back button in search of a different result – one they can trust.

About external content: It’s also important to remember that first-time visitors won’t just find content from your domain on search engines, If you’ve got press releases, articles, white papers, contributed blog posts or some other external content indexed, visitors can come from there, too. It’s important to do as much as you reasonably can with that kind of content to maintain congruency with your messages. This means having a well-written author bio, about paragraphs, etc.

Trust and search engines

With search engines, trust is built by offering useful content in a way that’s not seen as spammy.

It’s a broad statement and sounds simple on the surface, but without knowing the ins-and-outs of each search engine’s algorithm, trust is quite simply a game of best practices. Of course, there are nearly as many interpretations of ‘SEO best practices’ as there are SEO consultants.

Some keys to offering trust (or avoiding distrust) with search engines is to:

Now, I know you might be thinking about other trust factors like backlinks, but not all backlinks are created equal. Chances are that a quality backlink comes from a quality site that (you guessed it) offers quality content in a way that’s not seen as spammy. I can only wonder where backlinks come from SEOs promise you 4,000 of them.

However, some things that are seen as spammy by search engines include:

• Hiding text – white text on your white background is a no-no. Even today, I see SEO ‘experts’ trying this and it simply isn’t worth the risk for anybody.
• Associating with ‘bad’ websites – A link to a site that’s spammy is not quite as bad as doing the spammy stuff on your site, but it’s still something you want to avoid.
• Tricking visitors – Optimizing a page for one term but having it re-direct to a different, unrelated page is spammy and outright dishonest.

It’s pretty simple – do anything that can be perceived as tricky by humans and you’ll see much more success online.

Trust must be an integral part of your SEO strategy. And trust with search engines it really, in one way or another, boils down to content – which is the majority of what search engine spiders see when they visit your site anyway. Create useful content, link it to friendly places, don’t try to trick the search engines, and you’ll see your level of trust rise along with traffic and organic ranking.

Until next time…

In our last post about SEO management for business, we talked about learning the language of SEO and setting goals.

Today, we’re going to talk about something that goes along with goals, and that topic is determining your SEO budget.

Now, this topic can get complicated depending on whether you’re outsourcing or keeping everything in-house. As with most things involving SEO strategy, you need to start out by asking some questions before deciding on a dollar amount or sending out an SEO request for proposal (RFP) for your project.

Who built your website? This is important, because there are many ways to design a site and not all of them are search-engine-friendly. DIY folks who create their sites using their host’s software could be at a disadvantage when it comes to SEO because of the way their site is constructed.  Additional find could be needed to either update the site or re-build it altogether.

How is your website performing? You should be armed with information such as popular keywords for visitors who find you thorough search engines. This is basic analytical information that every web host makes readily available through their control panel. If for some reason this info isn’t available to you, consider a new host or looking into Google Analytics or some comparable tool. The good news is, you don’t have to pay for analytics software – and the information they can give you is valuable. Take time to gather the right data and use that to gauge your performance.

What is your competition doing? If your competition isn’t doing much in terms of optimization, then maybe you don’t have to work quite as hard to reach your goals. You’ll still have to work, obviously, but there may be low-impact SEO activities that you can cut back on while you focus on core SEO best practices.

Who are your customers? Not all customers are created equal when it comes to using search engines to find products. You may have only a small number of customers who are using search engines to find you. Throwing disproportionate amounts of money toward a small group might not make economical sense in your budget.

What do you expect from your SEO efforts? I know this question can be a tough one – especially when you are new to SEO and are wary of SEO consultants’ promises of #1 ranking, unlimited traffic and other snake-oil promises.  Start answering these questions with the questions we talked about in part I, and see if you can’t narrow them down to be even more specific. The more precise you are with your expectations, the more precise you can be in your SEO budget.

The video above is classic SHADY SEO

Now, you can find the answers to these questions on your own with a little homework and some serious thought, but at this point, it might also be wise to work with a consultant. Not somebody to necessarily DO The work, but someone who can talk through a few things with you – to help you come up with the ideas that you have in your head but can’t readily get onto paper. (Trust me when I say this happens a lot – people know what they want from SEO, but they have trouble communicating it in a way that an SEO expert can act upon).

SEO budgeting is different for every company. I wish I could give you a checklist with some SEO tactics and some pricing and call it a day, but that wouldn’t do anybody justice. Every website and company has different needs, and every SEO consultant has different views about how to meet your goals.

In part III, I’ll talk a little more about SEO strategies and tactics and what they all serve to support – trust.