Search Engine Optimization for the Green Industry
How blogging has democratized search engine optimization (SEO). Plus, leveraging the Creative Citizen wiki platform to SEO green products and brands.
Overview
In this paper, we’ll demonstrate how blogging and social media have effectively democratized SEO so that not only anyone can do it, but you can do it more effectively than the supposed professionals. We’ll also use Creative Citizen as a prime example of how a wikibased platform can play a central role in SEO’ing your green product or brand.
Making SEO Work for You
Let’s assume that your company sells a product and that it has a website. Most web designers have basic knowledge of SEO and should build your core pages accordingly. That’s your foundation. An SEO firm will then tell you that you need ghost pages with a bunch of keyword-rich content that no one will actually ever see or read. They’ll get you to buy links on other pages to make it appear to the search engines that your site is more important than it is. They’ll convince you that this hokuspokus is the only way to make your site discoverable. What they probably won’t tell you is that you can start a blog using free software and achieve better, more sustainable results for a fraction of the cost. And if you pursue blogging as a business practice, then this superior form of legitimate SEO will actually become a valuable byproduct of effective blogging and social media marketing. One of the SEO advantages of having a company blog and organizing your content accordingly is that search engines and blogging platforms go together like peanut butter and jelly.
What is SEO?
We divide SEO into two categories: legitimate and illegitimate. Most of today’s SEO strategies mix a bit of both, though illegitimate SEO tactics are quickly becoming antiquated. Legitimate SEO is consistent with the intent of Google’s general rules for ranking search results. To the best of its ability, the Google search algorithm seeks to return results in descending order of relevance for any given keyword or phrase. It’s not intelligent enough (yet) to know this for sure, so it uses a number of criteria to make a best guess. If your website has been legitimately SEO’d, it will be ranked accordingly. Illegitimate SEO, on the other hand, seeks to fool the algorithm and manipulate the results such that a website earns a higher ranking than it might otherwise deserve. The problem with illegitimate SEO is that the search algorithm is constantly changing in an effort to weight results toward legitimate SEO, which is better for everyone. After all, when you perform a search, you want to get the best and most relevant results. This everchanging landscape renders illegitimate SEO unsustainable and means that a company needs to continue to pay an SEO firm to try and stay one step ahead of the algorithm changes. Eventually, search technology will surpass illegitimate SEO once and for all. Which will leave only legitimate SEO, and the focus of this paper.
Table of Contents:
Using Creative Citizen as Your SEO Tool
2 3
Creative Citizen as Your Platform
Creative Citizen’s Proven Results
3 3 4
Benefits of displaying your product or service on CreativeCitizen.com
How Your Products and Services can Rank at the Top of Search Engines
In Conjunction with Rob Reed of MaxGladwell.com
Rob Reed is a social media and marketing specialist with an emphasis on sustainability and CSR. He helps companies and non-profits to engage stakeholders through the social web and better communicate their stories. One of the primary channels is blogging. Rob is the founder of Max Gladwell and the Media Maxwell blog network, dedicated to improving quality of life as a goal and guiding principle.
Search Engine Optimization for the Green Industry Page 2
Which is also to say that if you can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you can SEO your own blog. When a search engine crawls a standard web page that hasn’t been properly SEO’d, it doesn’t necessarily know what to look for or what it’s looking at. It makes a best guess. When it gets to a blog, it knows everything it needs to know: title, content, tags, links out, links in, and how everything is ordered. If you use SEO plugins, this gives the search engines a helping hand. In this regard, blogging serves as an online marketing practice that is perfectly aligned with the intent of search algorithms and SEO. Search engines like to see well-organized and original content that is updated frequently and has links going in and out. That is the essence of blogging. It is why all blog platforms contain blogrolls for sharing links to other blogs and why linking to another blog post generates an automatic pingback or trackback. Instead of buying illegitimate links, it’s much more valuable, sustainable, and cost effective to share them with fellow bloggers and earn them through producing good content that is relevant to your product or business. Unlike paid links, these will actually drive traffic as opposed to simply gaming search results. And it enables you to network with bloggers, who might also want to write about your company or product. As an example, Max Gladwell has had tremendous success with its organic, legitimate SEO efforts. As of this writing, our post on Green Drinks has earned the 16th result for a search on “green drinks” (no quotes), despite never having written about Green Drinks before. As you’ll notice, this key search term “Green Drinks” can be found at the front of the title and in the sub-title. One should always consider what the top keyword search would be for a blog post and position them accordingly. A search for “Stephen Colbert Sierra Club” currently returns the first result, and a search for “water footprint” returns the 16th (no quotes). Blogging for SEO is one of the ways to make your product or brand more searchable and discoverable, but the social web offers no limit to the ways that you can “be a beacon” and help your customers find you. In this paper, we explore the green wiki platform of Creative Citizen and how properly listing your product as a Creative Solution can serve as a valuable complement to your SEO efforts.
Using Creative Citizen as your SEO Tool
Creative Citizen co-founder Argam DerHartunian is a seasoned SEO expert with a deep familiarity in both legitimate and illegitimate tactics. The Creative Citizen platform can be a powerful tool for helping branded products show up on the first three pages of search results for the general product-category queries e.g. searching for a general term like “solar panel” or “rain barrel” and returning your branded version on the first three pages of search results by way of Creative Citizen. Creative Citizen (CC) enables users to create, share and adopt green solutions for eco-friendly living. CC calls these “Creative Solutions”, which are habits, green products, and services that reduce environmental waste and save money. With the help of Creative Citizen you can increase sales by posting your product or service as a Creative Solution. Creative Solutions often rank in the top-three pages of major search engines, which increases visibility across the Web, helping to build brand awareness and increase sales.
Search Engine Optimization for the Green Industry Page 3
Creative Citizen as Your Platform
Creative Solutions that are posted on Creative Citizen can quickly get indexed with top search engines like Google and Yahoo. Exposure on search engines for a product or service often leads to increased sales and brand recognition.
Benefits of displaying your product or service on CreativeCitizen.com
Immediate Search Engine Placement for Relevant Keywords (3 – 5 days) Your company’s Creative Solutions will get high search engine rankings (page 1 to 3 of search results) for relevant keywords when you post on Creative Citizen because of the high ranking Creative Citizen gets on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. You benefit from FREE traffic to your website. Build Brand Recognition Exposure of your brand on popular search engines and CreativeCitizen.com is an invaluable way to build your brand. The tangible effects of your products and services exhibited within a Creative Solution will help your customers understand the benefits of using your product or service for them and the planet. Drive Sales Drive online and offline sales from FREE traffic generated from CreativeCitizen.com and popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Receive Unique Market Research Data Because users can comment on Creative Solutions, you will receive valuable feedback about any Creative Solutions related to your brand. Creative Citizens are leaders in green thinking and will provide useful comments about your products or services. Uniform Layout for Products and Services As MySpace.com is for music, CreativeCitizen.com is for green products and services. Each Creative Solution’s layout is uniform so that potential customers can immediately know about a green product or service and understand the ecological benefits associated with it. This allows customers to quickly and efficiently make purchase decisions. As a result of the rich content on CreativeCitizen.com, the Creative Solution that houses your product or service is likely to come up extremely early in search engines.
Creative Citizen’s Proven Search Engine Results
The following results are just a few of the examples of competitive keywords that rank at the top of Google and other popular search engines as of this writing.
Search Engine Google Google Google MSN/Google Google Google Google MSN Google
Search Term cng cars eliminate junk mail sustainable salon terracycle rain barrel terracycle orchid fertilizer solar generator kits 10w led all in one soap reusable dishes
Page 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Rank 7 9 1 7 1 9 9 4 1
Search Engine Optimization for the Green Industry Page 4
How Products and Services can Rank at the Top of Search Engines
Posting Solutions and ranking at the top of search engines is simple and intuitive.
Tips for your SOLUTION DETAILS
• You want to be as descriptive as possible about your product or service. Don’t just cut and paste your description from your website; add commentary and tell people why your product or service is beneficial to the environment. • The first sentence is the most important: this is what will show up in search engines. • Make the first sentence describe your product or service using relevant keywords in less than 150 characters. • Make sure to include all keywords that pertain to your solution in the body. • The body can be as long as you like, but try to keep it below 350 words. The easier it is for the user to understand, the better the results will be. • EXAMPLE: Using “Solar Power Charger” as an example, include all specifications of the product, including keywords on how the product saves the environment. Describe energy savings, manufacturing processes, and daily use.
The steps
1. Visit CreativeCitizen.com and create a company profile by clicking on the Sign Up button in the upper right hand corner of the screen. 2. Once you have created your account and verified your e-mail address you can sign in by clicking on the sign in button at the top right corner of the screen. 3. Then, submit a Creative Solution by clicking on the Submit a Creative Solution Button on the upper right corner of the screen. 4. Input the details of your Creative Solution – TIP: Be sure to reference our SEO writing tips below! 5. Click on the Submit Solution button That’s it! You’re done. Post all your products and services as Creative Solutions on CreativeCitizen.com. Check back often to see the activity on the site about your Creative Solutions. Best of all – You get FREE search engine rankings. Check key terms you put in your post on Google and other search engines regularly to see how many FREE impressions you get.
Tips for PICTURES
• Input as many relevant pictures in the Creative Solution (recommended 2-4). • Make sure to title each picture with keywords that relate to the solution. (i.e. solar-power.jpg, chargerenergy.jpg, cell-phone.jpg, etc.). • If you have multiple pictures name each one with different keywords.
Tips to Improve Your Rankings for Creative Solutions on Search Engines
TIPS for the TITLE of your solution
• Make sure your title is not over 45 characters long. • Include keywords that pertain to your product or service. • Avoid branded marketing slogans in favor of simple solution statements that contain specific keywords, which will rank higher in search engines (this is important because of the sensitivity toward green washing, AND the importance of including simple keyword rich statements). • Example: “Save Energy with a Solar Power Charger” is much better than “SolarFlex Charger The Number One Solar Charger”
Tips for LINKS
Input the link to the website where you can purchase the product or service, or gain information about it. This helps drive traffic to your site and increase sales.
Tips for TAGS
Tags are keywords that help people find your solution. Add tags pertaining to your solution below the links section. You want to include anywhere from 7 to 15 tags of 1 to 2 words that relate to your solution. This is anything from your very general terms like “energy” or “home” to specific terms like “solar power charger.”