Organic SEO Articles by SEO Speedwagon

November 23, 2009

Google Indexes Its Own Toolbar Content(?)

I don't think this is a particularly big deal, but I am fascinated by crawler behavior and the wheres and whys of crawlers not honoring sites' specific robots directives.

And it makes it even more interesting when the robot and the site belong to the same company.

A few weeks ago, I was trying to find out exactly when Google overtook Yahoo in the race for search engine market share. (It's not important why, but it will help you understand why I was searching for such an odd phrase.)

I ended up searching for this query:

["google passes yahoo" "search market share" 2004]

And the results page looked like this:

If you click over, you can clearly see that we're in the /archivesearch portion of the toolbar.google.com site:

If you go to the Google Toolbar site's robots.txt file, however, you'll see that this portion is supposed to be off-limits to Googlebot:

(Note: This robots.txt file also has certain "allow" commands, but none that should pertain to this particular page.)

But wait. Couldn't this just be an "uncrawled reference" -- that rare-but-easily-recreated instance where Google indexes pages based on incoming links, but doesn't actually crawl the page, so therefore still honors the robots.txt exclusion protocol?

No, I don't think so, at least in this case. Uncrawled references are generally don't have snippets attached to them, and if you look at the SERP above, you'll see a snipped pulled from deep within the actual page:

I'm not claiming to know each subtle nuance of uncrawled references, but I study robots exclusion pretty closely, and this is the first instance I've seen of a section from within an excluded page being used as its snippet.

I'm certainly willing to concede that Google just happened to find this information somewhere else and attribute it to this page, but part of me making that concession is someone proving that it actually happened. I'm not tied to any particular outcome; I'd just like to learn more about why this happens.

Google Indexes Its Own Toolbar Content(?)
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May 27, 2009

Dafforn First to Discover Google Changes Profile Hop from 302 to 301

I am happy to report I am not the only one so oddly obsessed; money quote:

About three weeks ago, [John Lustina] noted that Google numerical-based URLs were redirecting to custom profiles, but they were using a 302 instead of a preferable 301. Today, however, I'm happy to note that's changed. As of this writing, the 302 has changed to 301.

Mark the time, SEO Friends; Google is listening to our Social World.

And with the step toward doing what they tell us to do, me Google Profile hops another steep up, to 5:

Is this why they wanted to 302 Hop[e], originally?

Dafforn First to Discover Google Changes Profile Hop from 302 to 301
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May 18, 2009

Google Profiles Now Above the Fold?

In spite of that odd numerical URL that persists and 302 hops, my Google Profile has proven to indeed be a climber, for the first time breaking above the fold for the vanity search I have been vainly keeping my own eye on from day one:

Now, as is normally the case with a non-temporary 302--THE problem with a non-temporary 302 you might conclude--I don't know whether to link to http://www.google.com/profiles/John.Lustina or http://www.google.com/profiles/116187582762783426547 when I am referring to it.

Google?

Google Profiles Now Above the Fold?
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May 4, 2009

Google Profiles Doing the 302 Hop?

Continuing in my vainglory of days past, I was surprised today while exploring below the fold to see my Google Profile suddenly appear as a tenth result along with the standard extra bottom result (with smiling picture) for a vanity search:

Even more surprising, if you look at the yellow highlighted rectangle, is that Google choose to show www.google.com/profiles/116187582762783426547 as the URL for the result, rather than the www.google.com/profiles/John.Lustina vanity URL that I selected as my preference, when offered, in the initial setup of my Profile.

Now, I was happy to see that it redirected to http://www.google.com/profiles/John.Lustina when clicked, yet wondered why the numerical URL would yet list if the redirect were a 301. My SEO senses tingling, I went to Rex The Answer Man to find this:

Why a 302 temporary redirect? Why not just keep them numerical rather than vain if they are not going to implement a proper 301?

Isn't that what they would have us counsel our clients in a similar scenario?

Google Profiles Doing the 302 Hop?
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April 28, 2009

Bonfire of the Vanity Search Revisited

Not three days later, the Google Profile influence now has ordered the top six:

Note to self: the right column space is pretty important:

Bonfire of the Vanity Search Revisited
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April 25, 2009

Bonfire of the Vanity Search

Although unveiled in the innocuous position last--always, mind you--of the first page for your name, it seems more likely ever-prescient Google has a larger share in mind than the 10th result on a page; namely, a cover page for Socially skitzophrenic above-the-fold situations like the following:

Are they actually after, rather, One Profile to rule them all?

Bonfire of the Vanity Search
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December 19, 2008

Spanish Site SEO Pays Off

In 2007, one of our long term clients launched a Spanish version of their web site. Their site is very content rich and has approximately 1,000 pages. During the course of 2008, we've worked closely with them to optimize these new pages with the goal of significantly increasing search traffic.

Here's a look at the results to date...

Prior to optimization of the Spanish pages, of all search engines, Google Spain was ranked #33 in bringing visits to the site. After optimization, Google Spain is #3 behind just Google and Yahoo.

To make this kind of jump, Google Spain brought just 53 visits per month to the site prior to optimization. Now the site is receiving over 10,000 visits a month from Google Spain. Google Spain now brings more visits than MSN and AOL.

Here's a closer look at the visit numbers before and after optimization:

Search Engine		Monthy Visits Before SEO		Monthly Visits After SEO
Google Spain		53		10,310
Google Mexico		41		6,383
Google Columbia		15		3,207
Google Venezuela		8		3,001
Google Peru		8		2,926
Google Chile		16		2,442
Google Puerto Rico		23		689
Google Portugal		33		137
Total		197		29,095

We expect these monthly visit increases to bring a minimum of 350,000 additional new visits to the site in 2009.

Excelente!!!

Spanish Site SEO Pays Off
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December 16, 2008

Details, Details, Details

They say the devil is in the details but in this case it's just Frosty the Snowman. A recent search on behalf of my son returned this little detail that can be a good reminder to double check even the little things like Page Titles.

Remember, Google is making its list and checking it twice....

Details, Details, Details
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September 29, 2008

Branded Phrases, Sites & Conversions

A recent comScore study for the Pharmaceutical industry analyzed the brand awareness and conversion impact of search marketing and visits to a brand web site.

The conclusion? "Branded Websites Are the Most Effective Online Marketing Tactic"

For those of us in the Search Engine Marketing industry, digging into the study provided some new conversion rate data for brand sites:

"Getting a patient to visit a branded Web site is the most effective form of online pharmaceutical marketing, with an incremental patient adherence rate nearly 20 percentage points higher than among those who did not visit the Web site...."

As search marketers, there is no revelation in these numbers. We know that search engine traffic from branded phrases often brings higher conversion rates.

However, this is a good reminder and does provide us with another study and statistic that shows the importance of an ongoing strategy to have your brand's web site above the fold at search engines for your branded search phrases.

Branded Phrases, Sites & Conversions
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July 29, 2008

What We're Reading: Summer 2008

Here at Intrapromote, we are constantly reading industry articles and books and discussing them as a team.

Here are a handful of books (plus one) we are currently reading:

• Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
• The Power of Persuasion: How We're Bought and Sold
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
• Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media
• The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media
• Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online

Stay tuned for staff book reviews!

What We're Reading: Summer 2008
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July 1, 2008

Javascript Redirects = Risky Business

I've run across a few Javascript redirects lately, so I thought I would share a quick reminder with everyone.

If you use a Javascript redirect vs. a 301or 302, don't forget that search engines generally cannot access Javascript, so it's likely that the search engine spider will not follow or index links within the Javascript.

It's also very risky business according to Google. From Google Webmaster Help Center:

"When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot..."

Matt Cutts from Google calls Javascript redirects "sneaky" and follows with "Your domains might get rained on in the near future." Yipes!

All very good reasons to avoid Javascript redirects.

Is it time to do a quick audit of your site to see if Javascript redirects are in play?

Javascript Redirects = Risky Business
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June 13, 2008

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?

Sean saw it coming yesterday, and little more than a Month ago I thought it a Yang Threat to balance the Microsoft yin of bluster.

Yet here we have it, and have you ever read anything that made Yahoo suddenly seem more insignificant?:


If the Google partnership passes what's likely to be a rigorous review by U.S. antitrust regulators and lawmakers, Yahoo! intends to use its rival's superior search technology to display ads on its own Web site as well as those of its partners' in the United States and Canada.

Let us all give a collective search way of goodbye to the once great king.

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?
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May 23, 2008

Client Hits Home Run With: URLs Matter!


On this Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend, I thought I would share something very smart that a client recently said to me and a group of his colleagues.

In a nutshell, the discussion was about potentially rewriting dynamic URLs.

He said:

"One thing we can't forget is that URLs are marketing assets....they matter....they need to be friendly to both users and search engines."

For a moment, I felt like I was at Progressive Field, about to rise out of my chair and high five complete strangers around me after a Grady Sizemore home run.

I couldn't have said that better myself. Bravo!!!

Client Hits Home Run With: URLs Matter!
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May 21, 2008

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Gets a Big, Big Update

This is from much earlier in this fleeting year, admittedly, but with most focusing on the average words per search query increase angle of the story, I wanted to make sure and dig out a fine morsel from the very mouth of Google that may have been lost had I not:

14% of Google clicks come from paid search and 86% of clicks are organic.

True in court it may only qualify as hearsay, having come from the Google mouth of Avinash Kaushik to the ear of beu blog before finally being transcribed into print; yet, as you may remember from my earlier quest for a documented source behind that most mythical of numbers in all of SEM, the percentage of overall searchers clicking on an organic, rather than paid, search result, hearsay here surely now trumps unattributed there.

And the alleged statement is said to have come from Google's Analytics Evangelist, folks, so I think we are getting closer...

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Gets a Big, Big Update
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May 2, 2008

Implementing a 301 (Permanent) Redirect - Part Two

Back in September 2005 I wrote a post discussing how to 301 redirect in .htaccess. In that post I did not mention two important points:

1. Always re-upload your modified .htaccess file in ASCII mode. FTP programs generally transfer files in Binary mode. The modified .htaccess file will not work if it's transferred in Binary.

2. When you edit the .htaccess file in notepad or other text editors they tend to add .txt file extensions on the end. You have to go ahead and upload the file with the extension and then rename it once it's on the server (remove the .txt).


Quoting myself from 2005 (2005?)



There could be many reasons why you may need to use a 301 server-side redirect. Usually having to do with a site redesign, pages that no longer exist, branding issues, marketing campaigns and/or a new domain name.

Server-side redirects are the safe way (as opposed to the meta refresh technique) to transfer your traffic to the new site while still retaining your search engine rankings.

The Moved Permanently directive in the HTTP header tells the spider that the page they crawled has permanently relocated to a new URL.

It will take usually 6-8 weeks to see the old site drop from the rankings and the new site indexed. In the meantime you will probably see fluctuations in your rankings and/or traffic until things settle down to a comfortable level.

How To Implement a 301 Re-direct

Permanent Redirects using .htaccess:

Download the .htaccess file from your server's root directory. If there is no .htaccess file present then go ahead and make one in notepad and save as .htaccess (just as it appears, no extension). Upload it to your root directory after you've made the changes (in ASCII mode).

Place the following code in the .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.thenewsite.com/index.html - to redirect a single page
or
redirect 301 / http://www.thenewsite.com/index.html - to redirect a whole site


The initial command must be the path to the file name of the old page (/index.html)
That’s followed by a space
The final command must be the full URL of the new page (http://www.thenewsite.com/index.html)
If there is already code in the .htaccess file, place the new code at the bottom.
Upload the file to the server's root directory (in ASCII mode).


Here are a few other ways to redirect using your .htaccess file. These methods require the Apache Mod_Rewrite URL Rewriting Engine to be in place:


-Are you planning to move from an old domain to a new domain? There are many different reasons why you would need to do this. Place this code into your .htaccess file (modify to your URL):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.thenewsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]


-Do you want to redirect from a non-www version of your URL to the www version so you can avoid the possibility of duplicate content? Try this code in your .htaccess file (modify to your URL)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^thenewsite.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.thenewsite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]


Permanently redirect using IIS:

Start/Programs/Administrative Tools/Internet Services Manager

Click on the -Home Directory- tab.
Click the -A Redirection to a URL-.
Enter a URL in the -Redirected To:- section
Check the -A permanent redirection for this resource- to make it a 301. Leave it unchecked and it becomes a 302.
Click –Apply-

Implementing a 301 (Permanent) Redirect - Part Two
Posted by james at 12:28 PM | Comments (12)
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April 24, 2008

Foundational SEO: Branching Out With Best Practices Keyword Research

In a recent interview with Top SEOs , I was asked a question about the continuously changing SEO environment.

I replied, "I believe there are some foundational things about Search Engine Optimization that have not changed much over the last 10 years. Staying true to some of these core, foundational concepts of best practices SEO has played a significant role in the success of Intrapromote."

I encountered a very good example of this while reviewing one of our client campaigns.

We have an ecommerce client with a robust store offering a little over 500 products. With a list of specific product names in hand, I tasked our keyword research experts to dig deep into keyword research to see how people are currently searching for all 500 of their products.

When I say "dig deeper", I often use the word picture with clients of keyword research being like a large tree. Comprehensive keyword research starts at the base of the tree with broad keywords, then considers every single major branch of the tree and (here's the comprehensive part) every single large, medium and small branch connected to these major branches.

Our specific search behavior questions in this case:

1. Are search engine users searching for variations of these product names?
2. If so, what are these variations and what is the potential of driving additional traffic to the client's site by targeting these variations?

The end result of our comprehensive keyword research? Going down every major and minor tree branch revealed exactly 224 variations of the 500 product names being used at search engines. We estimate that these 224 variations account for over 2,000 user searches every single day at search engines. Since traffic is what we're after, each of these variations have now become new targets for our SEO, Link Building, and Social Media Marketing efforts for this client.

So, done correctly and regularly, comprehensive keyword research is a great example of a foundational SEO activity that has not changed very much. We even found that for one major brand utilizing various cartridge add-ons, search engine users don't search for "[product name] cartridges", they search for "[product name] software". Good to know that inquiring Googlers may be headed to a competitors site if our client's site is not optimized and performing well for variations of this product name along with "software".

Bottom line reminders:

1. A cardinal sin of keyword research is to not look for every possible variation of your product names.
2. Never, ever assume how people search for your products or services.

Foundational SEO: Branching Out With Best Practices Keyword Research
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March 4, 2008

SEO Success Factors

I was recently asked about the success factors of an SEO campaign. There are many, but let's take a look at three of what we consider the most important success factors:

1) Knowledge Is Power

It's very important for us to know what prior SEO activities have been conducted on a site. This can make or break the campaign. On a few occasions, our team of site analyzers have uncovered controversial techniques that even our client didn't know had been performed!

It's also very important for us to have access and learn from your web site analytics data. SEO is about getting the right people to your site from search engines. Your analytics data prior to SEO and after SEO is a constant gauge to see if your SEO company is traffic-focused, not just placement-focused.

Finally, the knowledge of understanding how your target audience is searching for your offerings allows an SEO best practices firm to shoot for the bullseye where visitors convert, not the outer rings of the target where visitors are "just browsing". Since the early days of SEO, this has not changed.

2) Link Popularity

With the significant weighting of link popularity in Google's algorithm, there are very few sites that can ignore link building. Now crucial to your site's success at major search engines is the continual effort of adding quality, relevant third party links to your site. Trust me, most of your competitors are doing just that.

3) Flexibility To Site Changes

We always make sure to take the temperature of potential clients as to their flexibility to make changes to their site that will make the site more search-engine-friendly. If you are considering SEO, I would suggest you rate your flexibility to site changes on a scale of 1-10. Bottom line, if you are below a 5, you may want to consider Paid Search along with Natural SEO.

SEO Success Factors
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February 20, 2008

Search Engine Marketing Myths

One of the questions we get asked is about myths in the field of SEO or Search Engine Marketing. Here are three of the most current SEO/SEM myths:

1. SEO is done once, then you sit back and enjoy the fruits forever.

Running a successful SEO campaign is not like launching a missile. It's more like driving a car. You see you're starting to veer to the shoulder, and you compensate. You make turns when necessary. When we explain upfront to a client that during a campaign, we're going to work, then observe, then work again if the results aren't what we want, most understand it, and it paves the way for a smooth relationship. Often, people think SEO is a two-party vacuum -- the client site and the engine. They don't typically realize that their competitors are also working hard, and that every time the client moves up a spot, someone else moves down -- and typically isn't too happy about it.

2. Flash (or AJAX, or any technique) is universally bad.

Upon starting a campaign, we're often greeted by some pretty hostile and defensive IT and design departments. They've read article after article about how a certain technique spells certain SEO death, and they assume we're going to preach the same doom-and-gloom sermon and tell them their techniques are forbidden. Certainly, we have our coding preferences, but we're not here to dictate look, feel, or overall visual design. Instead, we work very hard to suggest changes to supplement existing site techniques, not replace them. We study all sorts of sites, and we can cite examples of Flash pages that lead their industry with almost no text on the page. So balance is critical. What you lack with one SEO factor you need to make up with others.

3. Search engines love blogs.

This really isn't a myth as much as it is a misapplication of cause and effect. What search engines love is content in its best forms: unique, frequently updated, easy to link to (and from), and easy to access from the root domain. It's merely a coincidence that most blogging platforms meet many of these criteria with minimal tweaking. To say that certain content performs better than other content because it's on a blog is like saying that certain people have lower blood pressure than other people because they frequently park near the fitness center. This misses the bigger picture. Search engines loved news sites long before blogs became popular, because well optimized news sites have the same characteristics. The difference today is that content platforms enable this type of site much more readily than they did 10 or even 5 years ago.

Search Engine Marketing Myths
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February 8, 2008

Tracking Local Press Release Syndication Performance

If you are a PR professional and looking for a way to track your newly syndicated press releases across a local platform then you've got to check out "Google's News" new local search feature. Now you have the ability to look up your news via zip code, city, or state and see what's showing up in your local market. You can use this information to see how well your local PR campaigns are doing online and get a better feel for other places to possibly syndicate your news.

To check out the new Google News local search feature go to news.google.com and scroll down the page, look for the "Local News Category", and enter your pertinent information into the search box. You will then be presented with the latest local news that reflects whatever region you are searching for online.

Your news results will look like:



Then to monitor your local news with ease on a daily or weekly basis create a Google Alert with your local news preferences are you are good to go!

Tracking Local Press Release Syndication Performance
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November 28, 2007

Are You A Canonical Fascist? Stand Tall!

We are sticklers with our clients when it comes to issues of content duplication, sometimes to the point, I think, of being viewed as Canonical Fascists. This can be annoying, much like fascism mostly can be annoying, so it is gratifying to see Mr. Google himself lay out just why such annoyance is worthwhile advocacy, even approaching the subject of PageRank Splitting in the process:


When I did a wget from the Googleplex, I eventually got a 301 from the seomoz.com url to the seomoz.org url. But look at the timestamps: " --09:28:33-- " was the initial fetch and "--09:32:41--" was when the 301 came over the wire. Assuming that I'm reading right, that means almost a four minute delay on getting the 301 from seomoz.com to seomoz.org. Googlebot will wait around for several seconds for a page, but it won't wait four minutes. Instead, the connection will time out and we'll treat those urls as separate (and think that we couldn't fetch the seomoz.com url). So if a bunch of people are linking to your article, and some link to seomoz.org and some link to seomoz.com, that PageRank is getting split between two urls, and the long delay on the 301 response can cause Google to believe that the urls are separate and therefore cause dupe issues.

Hat tip to Randfish for calling forth such manna in his heavily commented comments area.

Are You A Canonical Fascist? Stand Tall!
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November 15, 2007

Tagging The Site Organic

We spend a great deal of time on site structural issues with our clients, and one of the first things we usually do with a new client is try and transition them from thinking of SEO as a page-level concern to more of a holistic, organic discipline, one where we must try and understand the site architecture in its interdependent relationship between the whole and its parts. After all, organic is ultimately the moniker that won the day.

Almost invariably the large sites that we recognize are not living up to their potential are what we call top-heavy architecturally, in that the TLD so dominates all things search that even the main folder levels are all but invisible, let alone deeper, longer-tail-rich pages. As we explain the phenomenon we often find ourselves referring to blog structure, and how we might borrow some of the structural characteristics of a blog in discovering how to flatten out the top-heavy site. There are reasons blogs are so eminently crawlable.

One of those reasons is tagging, and I was pleased this morning to find a fellow tag-appreciator in Stephan Spencer, explaining his tag appreciation more eloquently than I have yet seen done to date:


Tagging isn't just a tool for usability (even though it's typically mostly thought of in those terms), it's also a powerful weapon for search engine optimization. That's because tagging allows you to rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure, flowing the link juice more strategically throughout your site. And because those links are textual and keyword-rich, a tag cloud is far superior in terms of SEO to the traditional graphical navigation bar.

Bravo, Stephan. Long live tag conjunction!

Tagging The Site Organic
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November 1, 2007

Search: Too Sexy for Advertising?

Search Quote of the Day from He of the Great Name:

Search is utilitarian. Search is constantly accused of not being sexy. That drives me nuts. The irony is that in pigeonholing search as being boring and utilitarian, all these brilliant advertising minds are missing the biggest idea of all: search works because it’s the customer driving the process, not the advertiser.

I'm with you, Gord. In our industry, conversions are sexy.

Search: Too Sexy for Advertising?
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October 17, 2007

The Art of Honest SEO

Next month I will present a webinar on "What is SEO?" Instead of talking about key phrases, links and code, I will talk about what matters to my audience most: They want to know how online marketing can help them sell more widgets than their competitors. I can get into the nitty gritty explanations later. And to be honest, there are very few people out there who are totally unacquainted with the subject. This is my chance to show them a wholistic viewpoint; what my company is all about and how we can partner together to achieve the customer's goals.

I always like to start these presentations with a definition of what we're shooting for: I want the audience to understand that the goal is to improve the site's usability for human beings, along with its search engine friendliness. A no-tricks, no-spam approach delivers the best results over time, as Bruce Clay explains so well in his excellent article "Search Engine Optimization Standards and Spam Discussion."

What we do is part art and part science. I fall fairly heavily on the "art" side myself, and have always believed that creating content with human users in mind also reaps rewards on the search engines. Jill Whalen in her recent article "The Art of SEO" reiterates her longstanding belief that there is no magic SEO formula; in fact being too stringent with SEO "requirements" may likely trigger search engine spam filters. I'd rather get to know my customer and his business so I can apply my SEO knowledge to improve his website, instead of just overloading it with SEO elements.

All of this said, I won't pretend that I don't want to persuade prospects to work with my company. But I want them on board from the start for all the right reasons. Explaining "the art of honest SEO" has always proven to be time well spent.


The Art of Honest SEO
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October 13, 2007

Web 2.0 and Social Media Optimization Trends: Memetrackers

I have been scoring the Internet the last few days trying to find resources related to Web 2.0 and/or Social Media Optimization and I came across the idea of “Memetracker Web Sites.” From a Web 2.0 perspective these sites are geared towards collecting information about “hot topics” or things that create a “buzz” in the news or Blogging communities and make this information readily available to the masses. Wikipedia defines the word “Memetracker” as “a tool for studying the migration of memes across a group of people. The term is typically used to describe Web sites that either: A) Analyze blog posts to determine what Web pages are being discussed or cited most often on the World Wide Web, or B) Allow users to vote for links to Web pages that they find of interest.”

The first Memetracker site was most likely Gabe Rivera’s news and politics site called “Memeorandum.com,” which used an algorithm to collect top stories from a plethora of news Web sites and Blogs.

Here’s a list of the top old school Memetracker sites online:

1) Blogniscient
2) BlogRovr
3) Blogrunner
4) Blogsnow
5) Buzzfeed
6) Chuquet
7) Daily Rotation
8) Feedable
9) Megite
10) Newroo
11) Slashdot
12) StrategicBoard
13) Tailrank
14) Techmeme
15) Technorati Kitchen
16) Tinfinger
17) Topix.net
18) TruthLaidBear

How do I benefit from visiting these sites?

Although these sites are viewed as old school Blog news aggregators, they can still be utilized from a “Reputation Management” standpoint. These Blog sites will enable you to see exactly what is being said about your company products, services, complaints, etc. Use these sites as monitoring resources and be proactive in terms of reputation management – don’t get caught being reactive!

Web 2.0 and Social Media Optimization Trends: Memetrackers
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October 8, 2007

Yes, Virginia(,) SEO Philology

I was quite humbled to see via Link Spiel heute morgen that yours truly unwittingly birthed the SEO Virginia genre long, long ago, circa Summer 2001.

And while they say everything changed after September 11, really the only thing the genre lost in the aftermath was the Really Is convention I thought was authentic at the time. Turns out while I had invented Really completely out of thin air, but not the all-important Is, what we really lost in exactly half of the genre along with our innocence was the comma after the introductory Yes I had faithfully inserted at the time.

SEO Virginia genre history buffs will note Danny Sullivan took less than a year to catch, and correct, his own mistake, the only such self-correction on record. He really is that good.


UPDATE: Reader Brainmuffin e-mails to suggest the genre be officially known as The SEO Virginia Monologues.

Yes, Virginia(,) SEO Philology
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October 1, 2007

Google Search Results Already Finding Columnist Articles

Frank and Maureen and Thomas, oh my!

The chipped cement still has yet to be cleaned up fully from the wall being torn down at that historical error known as TimesSelect, and already we are seeing NY Times columnists able to commune with readers freely at point of search, at least at the Frank and Maureen level:


As internet titan Alan Meckler noted in his posting of the Times e-mail to subscribers, search results like these were the driving force:


Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.

Sharing it, linking to it, and commenting on it are the currency of being able to find it in search, and that might be important to a newspaper if, as the latest surveys indicate, 91% of adults use a search engine to find information and 72% get news therefrom.

Ya think?

LATE UPDATE: We just noticed that similar to 1989, another Eastern Block Web Site is about to topple...

Google Search Results Already Finding Columnist Articles
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September 28, 2007

The Emergence of Universal Search Engine Optimization

In May of this year, Google announced its new Universal Search System which blended traditional search results with news, video, music, images, local and book search engine portals, as well as Blogs on a single page to help users find information with greater ease. Universal Search, a new platform which represents a major shift in information display and retrieval, is causing search engine optimization companies to rethink how they conduct service offerings. So what does this mean for SEO professionals?

For those who conduct Search Engine Optimization services for clients, “Universal Search” is yet another marketing opportunity worth considering. Our industry is already known for dealing with extreme change on a monthly basis, and as a result of being able to adapt to this ever-changing market, this has enabled us to thrive in the industry. With these changes, we must re-invent or enhance our offering to meet the growing changes presented by Google in order to stay ahead of the curve. The emergence of Google’s Universal Search now forces SEO professionals to look outside the box for providing their customers with bleeding edge Internet marketing solutions.

To be able to help our clients rank in the top Google search results, we now have to look towards creating effective SEO strategies that involve RSS, news, videos, audio files, images, local and book search engine portals, and Blogs. With so many new things being displayed in Google’s search results it will be much harder to attain a top ten search engine listings for clients. However, this doesn’t mean that the world is coming to an end for SEO’ers. Nevertheless, it means that we must look towards existing Google search platforms and integrate them into a new strategy called “Universal Search Engine Optimization.”

Universal Search Engine Optimization encompasses traditional SEO (on-site & off-site) methodologies as well as combines Web 2.0 marketing tactics, i.e., RSS, Online Optimized Press Releases, Podcasts, Vodcasts, Blogs, Social Bookmarking, Social News sites, Image and Book listing optimization, as well as Local Search, that aids clients in gaining a greater market share within Google’s Universal Search results.

The following Internet marketing activities make up a large part of Universal SEO:

"Definitions in parenthesis taken from Wikipedia"

RSS -- “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.”

Online Optimized Press Releases -- Tailoring a company’s news in such a manner to gain greater visibility online through optimizing elements within the press release.

Podcasts -- “A podcast is a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.”

Vodcasts -- "Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand or video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures.”

Blogs -- “Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.”

Social Bookmarking -- “A way for Internet users to store, organize, share, and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.”

Social News Sites -- News aggregation (social network) sites that gain stories from community members online.

Image Optimization -- Effectively optimizing image file names, alternate text, and the utilization of photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, etc.

Book Listing Optimization -- Optimize Book company Web site pages to enhance placement in search engines for the titles of books for sale.

Local Search Listings -- Create local business listings and optimize Web sites to better perform amongst local search engine (Google Local, Yahoo Local, etc) listings.

To stay competitive in the ever-changing SEO industry, we need to create strategies for our clients that focus on all aspects of Universal Search. I believe this new form of search results presented by Google will open many doors for companies seeking to embrace the evolution of search.


The Emergence of Universal Search Engine Optimization
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September 18, 2007

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989

We knew it was coming and we tried to bake a cake for Maureen Dowd more than a Month ago, yet we are still surprised at how search-friendly they are being in their explanation today:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

If you have any doubt that this is the SEO equivalent of 1989 scroll a bit further down the page for this money quote:

The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly one million paying online readers, generating about $65 million in revenue.

Dow Jones and the company that is about to take it over, the News Corporation, are discussing whether to continue that practice, according to people briefed on those talks. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has talked of the possibility of making access to The Journal free online.

Mr. Murdoch, tear down that wall!

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989
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September 17, 2007

PPC vs. Yellow Pages vs. Direct Mail CPA

Via Chris Zaharias via MediaPost via Piper Jaffray, we get this stark contrast:


Search advertising has proven to be fertile ground for customer acquisition. A recent study by Piper Jaffray & Co. entitled, “The New eCommerce Decade: The Age of Micro Targeting,” indicated that the average CPA for search was $8.50, considerably lower than the CPA for the Yellow Pages ($20), online display ads ($50) and direct mail ($70).

Could you imagine how low the Organic CPA would have been in comparison, had they found a way to incorporate that into the study?


PPC vs. Yellow Pages vs. Direct Mail CPA
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September 5, 2007

Boost Visibility With XML Sitemap Submission to Ask.com

We have been keeping a close eye on Ask.com and are seeing traffic increases from Ask.com for some of our clients. In fact, one e-commerce client over this summer has seen transactions more than double from Ask.com referrers. A 100% increase in transactions - now that really gets our attention!

We've shared with Wagon readers about submitting an XML sitemap to Google, to Yahoo and updated readers about the potential of submitting to MSN this Fall. I thought I would remind readers that you can also submit your XML sitemap to Ask.com and provide some simple how to's.

There are two ways to submit your XML sitemap to Ask.com:

1. Use the auto-discovery directive in your robots.txt file:

SITEMAP: http://www.yoursitemapurl.xml

2. Submit your sitemap via Ask.com's ping URL:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yoursitemapurl.xml

Lastly, make sure you're using the accepted sitemaps protocol.

Boost Visibility With XML Sitemap Submission to Ask.com
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August 30, 2007

New MSN Tools Coming Includes Sitemaps

Back in April, I updated Wagon readers on the latest in Sitemap and Sitemap Protocol news and now it's time for a quick update.

Last week on MSN Live Search's blog, MSN trumpeted their new Webmaster Portal that will allow sitemap creation and submission. A beta program has been started and the Wagon has applied for a test drive.

Along with these sitemap features, MSN also announced that the Webmaster Portal will also include crawling and indexing tools as well as statistics about web sites. As we've said in the past, these statistics can be very helpful.

Stay tuned for news on the beta program. Official launch of the Webmaster Portal is expected in early Q4.

New MSN Tools Coming Includes Sitemaps
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August 21, 2007

Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II

Article or Press Release?:

It's always seemed strange to look for information on a brand, and to see it appear both in the organic search results and at or near the top of the paid listings. Why spend money on a brand term that's going to deliver a top five organic result for the same query anyway?

If this sounds eerily similar to what many Wagon Riders thought yesterday was a lede of questionable intelligence, then your parotid attention may have kept you from swallowing full gulp. For those caught in the act of mastication, though, it's good to know that the above meme is being pushed by Atlas, owned by Microsoft, neither of which are owned or own or like Google, beneficiary of the great majority of the branded ad spend currently under PR assault.

Here at The Wagon we get the same strange feeling the Talking Point pushes in the quote above when we fix our eyes on a graph like the below:


With search behavior like that, why in the world would you want your brand to appear more than once, let alone a single time, in the same screen space above the fold? Good advice from the originator of democracy of screen space.




Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II
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August 20, 2007

New SEM Industry Term Coined: Disposable Clicks

We sure did have fun with this Quote of the Month while taking The Wagon for a spin this morning. From the magazine that takes itself so seriously it demands all caps, ADWEEK, we are treated to this breathless lede:

New research by Microsoft suggests a big chunk of search ad spending is wasted because advertisers pay top dollar for high ad placements clicked by consumers who are en route to their sites anyway. Listings tied to such "branded" keywords, typically a company's name or products, eat up about half of search budgets, Atlas estimates.

Wasted, indeed. Heard while The Wagon pulled up to fill itself up with coffee:

It's like saying Applebee's doesn't need specific signage or identifiable markings on its building to show out-of-towners where it is, because people are going to go there for dinner anyway. That is exactly how stupid this is.

Isn't this also an argument against any brand advertising of any kind?

New SEM Industry Term Coined: Disposable Clicks
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August 15, 2007

NY Times Select(s) Death over Charade

As you probably know, the NY Times has been the most prominent experiment in the paid content-behind-a-firewall-yet-at-least-partially-indexable model, and they are indeed now, finally, announcing via trial ballooning they are no longer going to put their most popular columnists behind that magic curtain one has to pay to sweep aside. After the magic show ends and the same fingers which initially drew the curtain are finished being pointed this way and that, this failed experiment will have had much to do with the principles of Link Building.


A party-goer cloaks her content as Maureen Dowd. Found on Flickr. Copyright 485i

First a great quote that helps explain the decision's relevance to our industry:

But the truth of the matter is that you get far more eyeballs when you're not locking away your content from the general public. The reality of Web 2.0 news is that people a rising tide raises all the ships. If you've got good content, and the Times does, people will link to it. When people read a technology blog like Engadget or a political blog like Daily Kos and find links to articles at the New York Times, everybody wins. Keeping your archives, op-eds, and other content locked up means that blogs and news sites won't link to you, won't give you credit for finding a story first, and won't drive up your traffic.

This lack of inbound links to the content-behind-the-firewall damaged traffic to the site not only through a paucity of visitors being able to click on these links to the columns themselves...:

...the share of traffic that the NY Times sends to NY Times Select has been decreasing over the past year – down by 16% year-on-year in July. With NY Times Select receiving more than two thirds (67%) of its US traffic from NYTimes.com, the decline had an impact with US visits to NY Select down 22% in the past year.

...in having to rely far too heavily on the parent site rather than third party links for traffic, but also in the residual effect such had in these columns' search engine visibility. With few third party inbound links accumulating with each new column, in fact from a deliberate online community decision not to link to content-behind-a-firewall, it is also very difficult for each new column to be judged more relevant than similarly themed columns emerging on the same topic that immediately acquire inbound links in the form of the same online community recommending them. It's no wonder the Times Select had to rely so heavily on clicks from the parent site for visits, as a great many of those visits were likely already subscribers. In that situation it is difficult to grow at the rate of the internet. Try these two simple searches for Frank and Maureen alone: nary a column to be found. Haven't they written quite a few?

I think everyone likely to read this blog knew this would happen. But to say we knew it would happen ultimately is not to say we are not happy to see even giants felled by an algorthm rejected, not select(ed).


NY Times Select(s) Death over Charade
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August 8, 2007

Download all query stats for this site (including subfolders)

I get the feeling that most people, even in our industry, using Google Webmaster Tools for themselves or a client aren't scrolling far enough on the Query Stats page to reach this link:



What you get if you click is rather unwieldy, sure, especially if you are dealing with a very large site, but the payoff is simply as large by the same degree. We are beginning to view it more and more here as a kind of matrix for how Google views your site architecturally, especially in light of GSI now having been moved to an undisclosed location. Actually, now that I've said it I'm a bit afraid it, too, will be taken away...

Download all query stats for this site (including subfolders)
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July 17, 2007

An Ampersand Gets More Results Than All Other Punctuation, Combined

This is one of those few demonstrably true things. Even though it might actually be more accurately described as a symbol, in our character-challenged world of SEO Title tags we are more likely to view it in the same manner we view the disappearing punctuation mark.

But Google knows it is a logogram, and treats it as such, differently from the mere punctuation it eschews.

Try each one of these searches yourself and tell me which one is the outlier: [!], [@], [(], [)], [-], [;], [:], [“], [‘], [,], [.], [?], [/]—and—[&]!

& is also so well respected as to have its own eponymous magazine. Now what punctuation can also claim that?


An Ampersand Gets More Results Than All Other Punctuation, Combined
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July 11, 2007

SEO Tools: SEO For Firefox

One of the tools I'm using more often these days is the "SEO For Firefox" extension/add-on created by Aaron Wall. SEO For Firefox provides site information including:

* Google PageRank
* Google Cache Date (date Google last cached the page)
* Cached (number of pages indexed at Google)
* Yahoo Links (incoming links from other domains according to Yahoo)
* Google Supplemental (number of pages in Google's supplemental index - see Erik's last post for an update on GSI)

One way to use it in Firefox is by selecting Tools > SEO For Firefox > Lookup Tool and entering a URL. Here's what the result looks like (click thumbnail image):



I use SEO For Firefox more often when searching at Google or Yahoo. Under each site listed in the search results, site information appears directly below each search engine result. Here's what it looks like (click thumbnail image)::



Each of the individual site "info blocks" are clickable if you want to dive in deeper and each can be turned on or off via the Options Menu. I recommend only turning on the info blocks that you are most interested in analyzing or monitoring since the more you have turned on, the longer it takes the program to pull all this information for every search engine result.

Also, when you're not needing this comparative site data, you can click the button in the lower right corner of Firefox to turn the program off.

SEO Tools: SEO For Firefox
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July 6, 2007

Google Weighs in on Image Replacement (sIFR)

On the rare occasion when an engine expresses an actual opinion on a real technique, It's a welcome, welcome sight. So imagine my glee when I read Google Webmaster Central Blog's take on dealing with Flash.

While John lamented the mixed signals just last month, we've been asking the question internally for years: From a best practices standpoint, does image replacement stand safely in the DMZ of glorified CSS, or does it boldly encroach the characteristic of "showing engines one thing and users another"?

And that's just the beginning. The real problem, when you're using image replacement, is not the insertion of stylized copy, but instead, what you do with the HTML text you're replacing. Some systems simply let it lie underneath the script-spawned Flash layer, while some use "hidden" status in CSS, while still others pull it off the visible screen and hard-code it somewhere in the -5000px range -- each of which is detectable and grounds for a good spanking if your motives are anything but pure. Traditionally, that left us with the worries of trusting the algorithm to detect our motives.

But forget all that, because today we know, and we know it based on the way all such things are Known -- because it's mentioned in an official Google blog, midstream in a list of "practical suggestions" about how to deal with Flash:

sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML -- it's just displayed by an embedded Flash object.

This proclamation, coming on the heels of Independence Day, is fitting, because no longer are we bound by the tyranny of not knowing on whose side of the fight sIFR truly sits.

Google Weighs in on Image Replacement (sIFR)
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June 14, 2007

The Google Supplemental Index Inbound Link(s) Threshold

Wagon Rider Pat Fusco penned a great primer this Month on the issue of Google’s Supplemental Results as they are tied to duplicate content, if you’d like to orient yourself first. Our own Wagoneer Doug offers some points on Getting Out of Hell Free (that is, at least, without requiring direct payments to Google), the last method of which involved examining backlinks, and the fact that a great number of pages in the GSI we have examined across the massive sites we spend time with each day seem to share the commonality of zero inbound links.

We are finding, increasingly, that the distance from zero to one in terms of inbound links to a page seems to be much more of a threshold for exiting the Google Supplemental index than, say, 2 to 100. This is not to say that 1 gets you out, bada bing, but that there is a great more deal of love granted from Google on that single giant step from nil to 1 than there seems to be on the next link steps a page takes out of infancy.

A baby’s first steps are much more exciting and remarkable than the subsequent toddling around the room that follows, and it may be helpful to think of Google watching a page with no links in the same manner.



The Google Supplemental Index Inbound Link(s) Threshold
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June 1, 2007

Flash, Javascript, CSS, Ajax, sIFR, and Textual Image Replacement... Oh My!

Not just because I am somewhat easily confused, but as our title today suggests, the overlap, literally and figuratively, among all of these web elements can and often is the nexus of confusion in advocating Best Practices SEO to any client development team, whether in-house or, um... out.

Comes now a Flash Engineer at Google (on the YouTube side) with the most elegant writing to date on the lines of demarcation in what he terms modern web development philosophy:


First off, you need to embrace web standards. Semantic markup and separating content from style and behavior is the only way you should be building your sites. Many web standardistas have been recommending this method of web development for years, and rightly so. However, this post isn’t the place to go into the whys of this type of development, so I’ll skip that part and just say this about how it’s done: There are three areas of front-end web development: Content, Style, and Behavior. You should always keep these three things separated as much as possible.

Content, Style, and Behavior as three separate things. Makes it all much easier to put in place and figure out where one stops and the other begins. The money quote helps even further:



Progressive enhancement is a method of web development that goes hand in hand with Web Standards. You start with your HTML (your content), then add CSS (your look and feel), then add in additional behavior (Javascript, Ajax, Flash, any other interactivity that isn’t handled automatically by the browser).

Content. Style. Behavior. Trot that out next time everyone is looking at each other confused.

Flash, Javascript, CSS, Ajax, sIFR, and Textual Image Replacement... Oh My!
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May 15, 2007

Rosie Now Powerful Enough to Mock SEO Speedwagon in The SERPs

My oh my. We have to admit we were a tad worried here at The Wagon of backlash when we exposed Rosie O'Donnell's exact same URL appearing as result #'s 1 and 2:


What we didn't know, though, was that her media influence extended to being able to poke us in the eye with a self-conscious rejoinder of a description in her now magically changed #2 result:


Never mind that she doth seem to protest too much in her description. The sheer SEO power of this woman is breathtaking.




Rosie Now Powerful Enough to Mock SEO Speedwagon in The SERPs
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May 8, 2007

SEO Best Practices - International or Region-Specific Sites and Domain Issues

Suggested Best Practices:

A good first question to ask is “Who exactly are we targeting?�? If you are targeting a specific country, targeting a specific language-speaking audience, or your web site copy is specifically for a country or language-specific audience, use a ccTLD (country code top level domain) that relates to your target country rather than a general .com domain. For example, a ccTLD would look like www.domain.fr, www.domain.ca, www.domain.jp, or www.domain.co.uk. Always use ccTLDs for each language of your site.

Avoid having multiple language sites on the same domain, e.g., www.domain.com for English language content and www.domain.com/fr/ for French language content.

Make sure that there is not any duplicate content on your .com and any other sites.

Make sure your pages identify what language they are in, e.g., meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="jp"

If you cannot use a ccTLD, use a subdomain, e.g., fr.domain.com. Google views a subdomain as a separate site.

Benefits Of Best Practices:

A ccTLD communicates to search engines the focus of your site.

A ccTLD is the quickest and most accurate way to communicate regionality to the search engines.

A ccTLD assigns more weight for local search. It allows your site to be more easily included in Google Canada, Google Mexico, etc.

Search engines tend to have higher confidence and often give a ranking boost to a ccTLD site for local searches. For example, Google France may give a more favorable ranking to a France-specific (.fr) site.

FAQ:

Q: What about using subdirectories such as www.domain.com/fr/? Can we do a 301 redirect from a subdirectory to a ccTLD, e.g., from www.domain.com/fr/ to www.domain.fr?

A: From a search engine perspective, it is always best to use a ccTLD. If a ccTLD is not possible, then consider using a subdomain. We do not recommend using subdirectories for international sites or language-specific sites.

Q: What does Google say about the use of TLDs, ccTLDs, subdomains, etc.?

A: “Use TLDs. To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that www.domain.de indicates Germany-focused content, for instance, than www.domain.com/de/." (Source: Google Blog)


SEO Best Practices - International or Region-Specific Sites and Domain Issues
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May 2, 2007

More Sitelinks Hijinks with Google Duality : A Tail of Two 301's

It's not just Rosie enjoying the new Google Sitelinks Value Meal. FON, that guerrilla Wi-Fi startup knocking at Starbucks doors via their neighbors, is also now seated at the table:

But note in the above the two highlighted URLs, which are indeed the same page, do a bit of a pa de deux with how they serve the language, in this case English. The Sitelinks serving places the language as served from the en subdomain, yet that very URL redirects in this manner:


So that subdomain 301s from its English language subset that the subdomain indicates back to the non-language specific setting at the WWW level, whence it makes another direct turn back toward the language specific:



The whole trail of 301s serving to have moved the language specification in the URL from subdomain to folder level, with a waving pass through nothing. Quelle bonne idée !

Perhaps it is if it's another way to order a Google Sitelinks Value Meal.

More Sitelinks Hijinks with Google Duality : A Tail of Two 301's
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April 26, 2007

Rosie O'Donnell's Google Sitelinks Value Meal

An interesting thing happened on Rosie's way out of the door of The View; her sudden, earth-shattering departure caused a quake of an anomaly in the Google result for her name -- namely, the exact same URL appearing twice as a result, both #1 and #2:

What gives? SEO purists might argue that as result #1 is in the Sitelinks formation and Rosie’s site itself links out in the main navigation to her blog, the URL highlighted above exists as both a shortcut that will save users time, per Google’s explanation of the criterion for URLs selected for the formation--



Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for.


--and also exists on its own, as a blog, and thus merits a listing apart from one tied to Rosie's site, ergo the Value Meal Result.

But surely this rare achievement cannot be helped by the fact that Rosie's site itself argues against that very justification with its Title Tag. Aren't those supposed to be quite important, and importantly unique?

Does Rosie's massive influence extend even into the algorithmic sphere?

Rosie O'Donnell's Google Sitelinks Value Meal
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April 19, 2007

Friends Don't Let Friends 302

Our 300 Series expert James sent out an important warning earlier in the year about 302's that aren't really temporary coming back to bite hard, and here at The Wagon we're starting to believe this may be a new Google theme for Spring.

The gist is there is a ticking clock on temporary, in that, we surmise, Google can tell when a 302 started, and it can certainly tell if it has yet to end. This makes sense. The unknown is what period between is given Google's blessing as truly "temporary" in temporal terms, and what then falls outside that window.

In 2007 so far, though, we are definitely seeing instances of the window slamming shut, loudly. And these are not spammers, no -- just, as can often be the case with a 302, used in a pinch with all intentions to return and fix, then forgotten. A promise written in the sand.

Please make sure any 302 you are using does indeed end, ultimately. If not, it likely will be ended for you.

Friends Don't Let Friends 302
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April 5, 2007

Rudy Giuliani Finally Winning the Race to be Himself

We said we'd keep an eye on Rudy's race against himself, and almost a Month to the day after we noted he was losing, he's now finally pulled into the lead, at last vanquishing Wikipedia as the most relevant Rudy Giuliani on the web.


It is appropriate now, literally, to say the candidate is coming into his own.

Rudy Giuliani Finally Winning the Race to be Himself
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March 27, 2007

Did You Know WWW and Non-WWW are Two Different Sites?

If you're an SEO you certainly do lest you are malpracticing. And if you're a Cutlett, you've likely concurred here just a little while ago but more likely immediately.

Yet in spite of immediate pick-ups of everything Matt posts and that fact that this is a day later, Good God, I want to highlight his explanation of why, if only to be able to link to this portion of it when I am asked why and do a poor job explaining why:

Some people ask “Why don’t you just assume www.example.com and example.com are the same?� The answer is that they don’t have to be, and for some websites they are different. For example, http://phpicalendar.net/ is a different page than http://www.phpicalendar.net/. This happens more often than you might think; FindWhat has different www vs. non-www pages, for example.

Best and simplest it's ever been put.

Am I now a Cutlett, too?


Did You Know WWW and Non-WWW are Two Different Sites?
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March 15, 2007

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Goes Primetime

It's one of the most mythical numbers in all of SEM, rarely published, seldom spoken; yet most industry insiders nod and agree, even if furtively, that the organic search share of total search clicks, meaning the percentage of overall searchers clicking on an organic, rather than paid, search result, is somewhere in the 70% - 85% region.

I was quite stunned, then, when by happenstance I came across this line in Macworld, of all places:

Site owners are eager to get their hands on the 75 percent of free Google traffic that is not affected by AdSense and AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click programs.

Still within that magical, mythical margin. Still unattributed. Damn nice to see as a given in a non-industry mag.

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Goes Primetime
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March 9, 2007

Apple Falls Far from the Search Tree

About a month ago, I did a quick review of Midomi, the audio search engine that accepts singing or humming as a search query.

The results were good. I hummed a tune, and Midomi recognized it immediately. It was "Love is Blue."

So here's the thing: When Midomi picked the tune, it gave me the option of purchasing Al Martino's version for 99 cents. But what if Al Martino's version wasn't the one I wanted?

You can probably guess the next thing I did. I booted up iTunes and punched in [love is blue], which turned up 150 results - no fewer than 45 of which had the exact title I was looking for:



Listening to a few clips, it was obvious that Al Martino's version was not the one I wanted. Instead, I wanted the version from Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra, and iTunes, not Midomi, promptly got my $.99.

While it's true that iTunes got my money, it had to work for it. I booted up the iTunes music store because I knew that querying any search engine for [love is blue] would not bring up any iTunes search results. And even it if had, I'd have to jump-start the ten-ton beast to buy it anyway. (Let's be honest. It has some nice features, but running iTunes simply to buy and play your music files is like using a Buick Roadmaster to get from the kitchen to the living room.)

Right now, iTunes (the data warehouse/ecommerce portion - not the front-end music player) is a little bit like AOL was in 1994 - an isolated island of content, cut off from the rest of the world with proprietary technology and firewalls. And for the good of humanity, you really want to smack people who constantly rave about how good it is.

Still, there's been a meager attempt to have the iTunes Store inventory live on the web. And I mean meager. Apple has set up a sort of web-based parallel universe to tie its iTunes database to the web. Let's say it falls short of its potential.

While you won't find it simply for [grease soundtrack], you can find these Apple URLs painfully limping along the HTTP turnpike if you filter your searches by site, such as [grease soundtrack site:apple.com]:



A couple tiny problems with that approach:

• The pages currently rest on the soft, red velour divan of the Supplemental index
• Nobody filters queries by site anyway
• The on-page widget fails at its raison d'etre - it's an iTunes detector that cannot detect iTunes:



(At least it doesn't work with Firefox. The Apple page had better luck sniffing iTunes when I ran it through IE. But that still doesn't change the fact that the iTunes library is almost totally invisible in search engines.)

Here's the bottom line. Apple engineers, if you're reading, hit "pause" on your Nano and read the rest intently:

Steve Jobs thinks only 3% of the songs on the average iPod come from iTunes. Understandably, he wants more. Joe Wikert believes that Jobs wants to increase his market share by abolishing DRM. He might be right, but come on, Steve - there's a much easier way:

Start showing up at the top when people search for [grease soundtrack]. Or [foreigner 4]. Or [green day american idiot]. Or [pink floyd meddle]. Get real and understand that DRM isn't your biggest problem. Neither is Sony, BMG, Warner, or EMI. (Maybe you've been fighting Microsoft so long you have some David/Goliath issues, but you need to get over them.) Your biggest problem - and ironically, the easiest to overcome - is Amazon.

Here's what you need to do:

• Port your entire iTunes database - songs, artists, reviews, everything - to the web with a REAL crawlable architecture. And while you're at it, publish the lyrics too.
• Get in bed with the browsers. Not your iTunes pseudo-browser evangelists. Real browsers. IE and FF.
• Get those browsers to help you build an extension, plugin, widget - whatever you want to call it - just like Flash or Quicktime. But this plugin serves as a bridge between your data store and the web. This plugin makes it possible to purchase songs from the iTunes database without requiring iTunes to run. If you're on the same machine as your music library, it will download songs also. If you're not on the same machine as your library, the song will download to that machine the next time you start iTunes on that machine. Make sure this plugin works.
• Give each track a REAL URL devoted to that track only. Give it content - not just cover art and an iTunes sniffer.
• Build that content by ensuring that every comment and review posted on iTunes gets written onto the web-based page too.
• Leverage the existing enthusiast base by getting links from sites that already rank for band names, music genres, and lyrical content. You can drive links to every song, tv show, movie, and podcast in your catalog by creating an affiliate program similar to Amazon Associates, which pays up to 10% commissions. (By the way, this will help you sell a few billion songs in the process.)
• Create and actively promote an API that lets other sites feature your 30-second music clips. (This will help you sell a few million more.)
• Have iTunes spit out indexable URLs on demand (those same URLs you created in bullet 4) so bloggers and journalists can link to them easily.

Apple's iTunes is the envy of the music database world. It has more content and more popularity than just about anyone. When Apple realizes that these two ingredients can spell total search domination, the company will have a real issue on its hands - where to keep all that money.

Apple Falls Far from the Search Tree
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March 7, 2007

Over Half of 2008 GOP Presediential Candidates Outranked by Wikipedia in Google for Own Name

Here and there The Wagon has been known to get political in its analysis, often to illustrate pols know not what they do on the internet. Today we have a new honey of a rankings scandal courtesy of techPresident:

In a recent survey, I found that Wikipedia has an expansive influence in organic Google search results for 2008 presidential candidates. For each candidate, their Wikipedia entry is ranked no lower than 5th place by Google. In addition, the Wikipedia entry ranks higher than the election web presence of that particular candidate for 25% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans.

Now first, lest the uninitiated, casual SEO observer not fully grasp the above search incompetence, it is quite difficult for a major brand not to rank first for its own brand name. You almost have to be doing something wrong at the site level, and most competent SEOs will be able to discover the reason for the glitch and remedy the error fairly quickly. The higher the brand recognition the greater the ease, if for no other reason than Google understands that a pure brand search will almost always signal an intent to find the brand site itself. Google's product is relevancy, as we like to say here.

Is there a more recognized brand on the techPresident list than America's Mayor, [Rudy Giuliani]? Yet at second he languishes, behind the Wikipedia entry replete with detailed analysis of the controversies not broached on the site he would like for you to rather visit instead.

The difference between these first and second positions? We know from the massive AOL search data leak that on that engine, at least, about half of all searchers click on #1 and south of 15% on #2, at least for the 20 million searches performed by 658,000 subscribers in that data sample.

If you are losing half of all searches on your brand that should be visiting your site uncontested, you should try and do something about it. Let's keep an eye on Rudy and see if he does.

Over Half of 2008 GOP Presediential Candidates Outranked by Wikipedia in Google for Own Name
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February 23, 2007

Thoughts On Current Search Behavior Study

One of my favorite classes in college was Consumer Behavior so I guess that explains my fascination with search behavior. I thought I’d comment on a recent search behavior study conducted by De Vos & Jansen Market Research.

De Vos & Jansen compared the search behavior of two groups of people: Buyers and Information Seekers. From the two groups of 25, their study concludes that the viewing habits of buyers and info seekers are different.

No shock there.

However, one interesting thing about the study is their conclusion that those searchers with the intent to buy viewed more search results and focused more on familiar brand names. More interesting is that while 98% of searchers reviewed natural search results, only 31% of those in the study viewed the sponsored (paid search) listings.

That 31% is probably a generous number, but with a sample size of just 50, I wasn’t surprised that much by it. Other search behavior studies have put this number in the 10-20% range.

The search behavior takeaway here is not rocket science.

If all your Search Engine Marketing eggs (dollars) are in the Paid Search basket (Adwords/YSM), you are missing out on a large percentage of your overall target audience.

Can your business afford to do that?

Thoughts On Current Search Behavior Study
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February 4, 2007

Check Those Redirects Or It Can Bite You

Recently I ran into an interesting situation with a long term client. For close to a year they enjoyed top position at Google for a very important keyphrase related to their industry. Without warning 2 weeks ago they dropped off the face of the earth for just the one phrase. They still held strong positions for all their remaining phrases and had even increased positions overall.

After some research I was able to locate what I thought could have caused the problem:

The client was using a tracking URL on a partner site to track visitors clicking through (pretty standard practice). When the user clicked through they were customarily redirected to the appropriate page. Everything seemed in order except for the fact when you pinged the www.client.com/default.aspx Google returned a result of www.client.com/default.aspx?tracking1234 and showed a duplicated version of the home page for both url's.

The partner site was using the tracking url with a text link containing the very important keyphrase the client had suddenly plummeted in Google for.

The first thing I did was to run a Header Check and found that the tracking URL was actually returning a 302 redirect to the client's home page. I consulted with the client and had them change this to a 301 redirect. Less than a week later they had regained their top position at Google for the important phrase. The tracking url has also been completely removed from the Google index.

There are many good "Header Checkers" out there. A few might be:

Web-Sniffer


Delorie


Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer

Stay diligent and stay on top.

Happy trails, Amigos!


Check Those Redirects Or It Can Bite You
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December 19, 2006

It's Key To Not Remove Yahoo Authentication File

Now that Yahoo has agreed to accept the Sitemap protocol , I've been going through the process of getting client sites authenticated via Yahoo's Site Explorer so we can submit sitemap files.

To be knighted as an authenticated site by Yahoo, you have to create an authentication key file then upload it to the root of your site. Once uploaded, you can request authentication.

We're finding it takes about 24 hours to get the thumbs up or down from Yahoo.

Just a tip for any of you doing the same.....

Once you upload the authentication key file and your site is authenticated, don't remove the authentication key. Yahoo will check periodically for the presence of the key and if it's removed, your site will be unauthenticated.

It's Key To Not Remove Yahoo Authentication File
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October 25, 2006

A Cure For The Summer Time Traffic Blues

“Well I'm gonna raise a fuss
And I'm gonna raise a holler
About workin' all summer
Just tryin' to earn a dollar�
Eddie Cochran, “Summertime Blues�

There ain’t no cure for the Summertime blues?

One of the clients I work with has some seasonality to their business and traffic to their web site either levels out or dips during the summer months. This summer was not any different, traffic-wise. Their search traffic numbers in the Spring months averaged 482,000 visits per month while their Summer average was 410,000 monthly visitors.

That doesn’t sound like it’s on the road to cure anything right?

A deeper trek into their analytics, though, raises the eyebrows. Their conversion rate during the higher traffic Spring months from visitors coming to their site from search engines was .825% which calculates out to approximately $13,918 in online sales per month. Their conversion rate during the “Summertime blues� months was 1.23% which is 45% higher than the Spring and calculates out to $17,538 in monthly online revenue.

Nothing like an increase in revenue to melt those blues away. But still, the higher revenue isn’t the real cure nor is the higher conversion rate.

The cure is in the answer to the question: Why is their conversion rate 45% higher?

The Cure

I have a fever, and the only prescription is a higher quality web site visitor.

I love best practices SEO.

Higher quality visitors are a direct byproduct of improved search positions for SEO-targeted keywords and phrases.

It’s no surprise to also see that this client had a Summertime increase of over 200 positions at Google for their optimized phrases.

A Cure For The Summer Time Traffic Blues
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October 2, 2006

Google Sitemap Feeds, Regular and Images, And Overlap, Or Lack Of

We hear from a Googler an important clarification that to date had been a bit murky, especially if you are creating both regular Google Sitemaps and Google Images Sitemaps (or feeds) for clients. At issue:

Can a site use both a Google Image Sitemap Feed and Google Sitemap, or does one supersede the other? And if there's no overlap between the two feeds, if there are pages in the images feed you'd also want to be in the main index, should you have those pages in both feeds? Is that ok?

The answer, Wagon Friends, is no longer blowing in the wind:

There's no overlap between the feeds and indexes here. The stuff in the image sitemaps goes only into Images, stuff in the other sitemaps goes into the main index. So no superceding, no overlap... and therefore it makes sense to use both sitemaps. No need to put pages in both feeds. As I understand it, the main sitemaps file won't really take image files into account anyway.

So, images only in Google Image Sitemaps, and not images but just pages in regular Google Sitemaps, which makes perfect logical sense, thankfully.

And to boot, the Googler it comes to us from has proven to be a Trusted Feed.

Google Sitemap Feeds, Regular and Images, And Overlap, Or Lack Of
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September 12, 2006

Google Webmaster Tools Uncovers Missed Site Opportunities

We have many clients whom we’ve helped create and submit sitemaps to Google through Google Webmaster Tools.

Simply put, a Google sitemap is a special file that resides on your server that enables you to tell Google what pages are present on your site. Once this is done, you can login to Google’s Webmaster Tools console and manage your sitemap as well as view statistics and error information about your site.

Some of the most valuable data provided by Google is under the Statistics and Query Stats tab.



Here you’ll find:

Top Search Queries – this data shows the top search queries for your site within Google’s placement results. In other words, the most popular queries where you have some presence at Google. These are highly searched-for keywords and phrases where your site shows up in Google’s natural search results. Think of this as a VISIBILITY indicator.

Top Search Query Clicks – this data shows the top search queries that sent traffic to your site. In other words, these are the most popular queries for which people actually clicked over to your site. Your site is getting clicks from these specific keywords and phrases. Think of this as a TRAFFIC indicator.

Along with the data above, Google also provides the Average Top Position of your site which is the highest position any page from your site ranked for that particular query.

While this data took us a while to digest and analyze, over the last few months we’ve been able to create some very helpful reports for clients. The secret to this data is not necessarily the data within the two groups of data above, but rather in comparing both sets of data.

For example, if a search query appears in both groups, this means the search query is both highly searched and found at Google (visibility of your site is good) AND the query is also getting clicked on (traffic is flowing from Google to your site). You may find that these queries are very important queries to your site, while others may not be. A few of our clients have been surprised by some unexpected search queries that their site is highly visible for and is also getting traffic from! The ideal situation, and a good indicator of SEO performance, in this example is to find some or all of your major keywords and phrases in this group. For us at Intrapromote, this would allow us to meet our first and second goals in an SEO and Link Building campaign: Placements (visibility) and Clickthroughs (traffic).

Perhaps the most “SEO-affecting� comparison of the two data sets is where search queries are highly visible (they are a Top Search Query) but they are not getting clicks (they are not a Top Search Query Click). We see these as potential missed opportunities IF the search query is highly relevant to your site.

For search queries where this occurs, you should ask yourself a few questions:

A. Is the keyword/phrase/query not ranking high enough on page #1 at Google to get clicks?

B. Why is the page returned by Google not getting clicks?

1. Is the page title and/or description on Google unappealing?
2. Are there on-page factors blocking higher placement?
3. What else can be done to push the page higher on page #1?

Google Webmaster Tools Uncovers Missed Site Opportunities
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September 11, 2006

Welcome to the Real Wiki, George Allen!

Allow me to play Oliver Stone for a moment. With the exception of the initial incident, I’m filling in the blanks entirely because I don’t care about the blanks. For the purpose of this post, my sole concern is illustrating how Wikipedia is impacting Election 2006, at least in one race (does anybody appreciate puns anymore?).

The initial incident is this video. Virginia Senator George Allen twice threw a racial slur at a gentleman holding a video camera. All else is conjecture.

Somebody at the Webb Campaign must have realized the power of natural search and the power of Wiki with respect to natural search. Perhaps it was the same person that realized the power of a blog. When the Webb campaign members got together and thought aloud about how to get this video in front of as many people as possible, somebody must have said, "YouTube!" Maybe those same people sat with Jim Webb and wondered how to get people to YouTube, and further, they just might have wondered if people would recognize this racial slur.

At this point, our conjectural hero would have gazed triumphantly over at Jim Webb, as theme music filled the room, and proclaimed, "You just keep talking about macaca. Wiki will tell people what macaca means AND show them the video." You see, our hero would know that search engines love Wiki, and our hero would also know that, although anybody can contribute to Wiki, it bears the authority and credibility of an encyclopedia. Get your story at Wiki, and trusting eyes will find it.

Now let’s see where google directs people that want to know more about macaca.

ADW: Macaca fascicularis: Information - Doesn't appear relevant. Move on.
ADW: Macaca fuscata: Information - Doesn't appear relevant. Move on.
Macaque - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "For the slur see Macaca (slur)" I wonder who added that to Wiki.
Macaca (slur) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - that looks about right. And what do they see when they get there? A definition, and later "Macaca and the George Allen Campaign Incident." And what else is there? A link to the Washington Post article and the YouTube video. Funny, those are the 5th and 7th Google results, respectively.

Now allow me to play Mastercard for a moment.

George Allen's Campaign - Big Bucks, One Whammy
Jim Webb's Campaign - Smaller Bucks, No Whammies
Video Upload at YouTube and Contribution at Wiki - $0
Racial Slur Pointed Directly into a Camera - Priceless


Update: The Wiki Battle Rages On
One of the coolest Wiki features is the edit history for a given page. Do you want to keep your eye on this vicious cock fight (politically speaking, of course)? Click here. And after that, click here.

Update Update: Destiny Takes a Hand
Macaca is now redirecting to Macaque. The former Macaca page is still here.

Stay tuned to find out how our fearless hero responds . . .

Welcome to the Real Wiki, George Allen!
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August 22, 2006

When User Behavior Strays from Query Volume

It's important but often overlooked: User behavior is rarely as steady and predictable as keyword research might lead us to believe. Eye-tracking studies, statistics about SERP clicks ("the first result gets X% of all clicks"), etc. are helpful if you understand that they're aggregates and not absolutes.

If you rank in the top slot for two phrases, and one of them is three times more searched-for than the other, you might assume that, all things being equal, the more popular term will deliver three times the traffic.

That's rarely the case, especially when those two queries straddle the border between branded and non-branded.

Following are some examples that we've noticed in multiple industries, for multiple clients. The companies and queries are fictitious; it's the types of queries, however, that matter - [product type] vs. [brand + product type]. The raw numbers - queries per day and monthly traffic - are irrelevant. Instead, it's the ratios we're watching.

Note that in the first example, [conflators] is searched for about 4.5x as often as [merrick conflators] (despite the fact that in the conflator world, Merrick is tops). At Google, Merrick ranks #1 for both terms. Yet [merrick conflators] delivers about twice the traffic of [conflators]:



In our second example, Simonaire is well known in the flot scram industry, but probably not as well known as Merrick is in the conflator biz. Still, Simonaire ranks #1 for both [simonaire flot scrams] as well as [flot scrams]. The non-branded term has about 30 times the query volume, but again, delivers only about half the traffic of the branded term.



Note: The query volume figures were pulled from Keyword Discovery. Wordtracker data varies slightly but is similar.

The conclusions of this non-scientific study aren't so easily drawn, but here are some observations and speculations:

• The point of this analysis is not to dissuade brands from going after single-word product queries. They should, however, realize that the percentage of clicks they receive from a top slot might not be what they expect.
• These results imply that people searching for [conflators] are not very far along the information cycle yet and might actually want to avoid a specific brand at this stage in their research, opting instead for a comparison site, wiki-style information site, consumer-focused FAQ site, etc.
• It's tempting to tweak titles, descriptions, and content to try to appear more cross-brand informational and capture more of the [conflators] traffic. But I don't recommend doing it at the expense of your branded traffic, because click for click, I believe a branded click is more valuable than a non-branded click.
• The traffic from the product-only searches sticks around 50-60% of the duration of the branded visitors, and they view about 75% as many pages in a visit. So we're gaining mind share a few at a time, and we certainly don't mind that their first look at the industry comes from our clients.

When User Behavior Strays from Query Volume
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July 18, 2006

NOODP = Yes!!!

I have no musical reference to my post this week other than to say that I find the instrumental gem called YYZ on Rush’s finest album, Moving Pictures, to be the perfect music to write a blog post to. I highly recommend it. And Neil Peart, I know you're reading this ..... you are the finest drummer on our planet.

Last Thursday, our fair-haired and highly regarded Erik Dafforn sent the Intrapromote staff an email with a Subject line that all IPers (Intrapromote staff) assumed was a bad joke.

The subject line you ask?

“Google now honors NOODP meta tag!�

This would mean that our clients could include a tag on their web pages to tell Google not to pull the often ho hum titles from ODP and use them as the title in search results pages.

“Yeah right�, was simultaneously (I like to think, harmoniously) uttered in our Ohio, Indiana, and Oregon offices as the email appeared in our collective In boxes. However, much to our surprise it is actually true!

Did Google finally get tired of people asking for this or did they quickly follow suit because MSN recently added support for the NOODP tag? Did Danny Sullivan finally get through to Google? Who knows, but my money is on keeping up with the competition.

It was good timing for me since one of the clients I work with needed to shake loose from a Google SERP that listed only their company name as the title. Clickability score? About a 2 out of 10.

If you’re in the same boat of folks disgusted by your ODP title and description and how it shows up upon searches at Google, simply add the following code to the source code of your page:

< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP" >

NOODP = Yes!!!
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June 20, 2006

Hey, Look At Me! I’m Ethical! (There, I Said It)

I’m becoming a fan of David Spade’s new show on the Comedy Channel called The Show Biz Show. My favorite segment is right after the news and is called “There, I Said It�.

So, here’s to you, little guy Mr. Spade as I tip my cap and say:

I’m getting a little irritated with SEOs calling themselves an "Ethical SEO Company". In fact, it may even be un-ethical calling yourself ethical.

First of all, who runs around saying, “Hey, look at me. I’m ethical.�? Really, have you ever in your lifetime ever heard someone arrogantly say, “I’m ethical�. And isn’t it most often when someone is un-ethical that it gets pointed out?

As for what SEOs do and how it relates to the definition of “ethics�, there are no accepted principles of right and wrong that govern the conduct of SEOs. In other words: It’s not a matter of ethics.

Perhaps some SEOs allow their sales staff to tout their company as an “Ethical SEO� simply because it sounds so honest, pure and safe. It really does, doesn't it? ..... [pause for momentary reflection] ..... After all, who would want to hire an un-ethical SEO company? This is just silly. I’ve seen hundreds of SEO RFPs and never once have I seen one with the must-have requirement: Ethical.

Are white hat SEOs ethical companies? Maybe. Are black hat SEOs unethical? Maybe. If an SEO claims to have a black box proprietary technology or techniques that mimic Google’s algorithm, are they ethical or unethical?

The bottom line is that all SEOs have methodologies and techniques that they recommend to their clients. Some of these techniques may be controversial and others may not be controversial. They are one or the other and the industry has done a pretty good job of making it clear which are which.

Ethically speaking, SEO techniques are neither right nor wrong so please, let's keep ethics out of it.

There, I said it.

Hey, Look At Me! I’m Ethical! (There, I Said It)
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May 9, 2006

Pagejacking and Vanilla Ice

Word Pictures – Yeah!!!

I know they wouldn’t admit it, but I’m sure some of my friends say I have a slightly irritating knack for comparing things and noting similarities. I call them word pictures and it’s something I learned a long time ago in sales training. I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t like or appreciate even a moderately good word picture. If you’re the first one, feel free to comment below.

Sometimes when explaining the intricacies of the world of SEO, I like to use word pictures. Technically stated, a word picture is defined as a graphic or vivid verbal description. Simply stated, a word picture explains something in a way that makes it easier to understand. When you hear someone say, “Let me put it this way…�, it’s highly likely that a word picture is about to follow.

If you’ve read some of my Wagon Posts, you can probably tell that music and SEO are two of my loves, thus the “musical SEO� posts and accompanying word pictures. Hey, it stays true to the “SEO Speedwagon� name coined by our very own quick-witted Link Building Director, Tom Lustina. Tom, I continue to salute thee!

And now that I can’t disappoint my adoring throng of readers (thank you, all six of you), here we go again.

Pagejacking

Plagiarism is a word that most people are familiar with. A much cooler, hip, web version of plagiarism is called pagejacking. Pagejacking is basically copying/stealing content or code from another web site and putting it on your web site with the intent of also stealing some of the other site’s traffic. The word “pagejacking� is a combination of “hijacking� and “web page�.

If it were me, I would have called it “pagelarism�. But, as usual, no one asked me. Sigh.

So, a pagejacker sees a page performing well at a search engine for a particular phrase they also want to do well for, they grab some or all of the content on the top performing page and copy it to their web page, hoping to also perform well at the engine. Sometimes pagejacking is exact copying and sometimes there is a minuscule change to tweak the hijacked page’s code or content, of course, in the pagejacker’s favor.

Pagejacking really caught fire with the Internet’s boom in the late 90s and is still very common today. In fact, when we perform our comprehensive site analysis of a web site prior to optimizing it, we spend much time investigating if our client’s site has any hijacked content on other web sites. We’ve seen some pretty wild cases of pagejacking over the years – even on Intrapromote’s web site.

In a 1999 case of what I’ll be kind and call “blaringly ugly pagejacking� which was settled out of court, one pagejacker found himself up against the FTC who charged him with violating the FTC Act. This particular case was of the variety mentioned above where there was one small change in the code which redirected the visitor to, let’s say, a highly undesirable site.

And now, what you’ve all been waiting for….the pagejacking word picture.

No, My Version Goes “Da, Da, Da, Da, Da-Da, Da-Da�

“It’s that extra Da at the beginning that makes it different!�

Those were basically the words of Robert Matthew Van Winkle, a.k.a., Vanilla Ice when asked about his music sampling of David Bowie and Queen’s song Under Pressure. He argued that one little note added to the beginning of Queen and Bowie’s version made his only hit Ice Ice Baby different than Under Pressure. There was no album liner notes thanking the writers or giving credit to the original song.

Today’s pagejacker is yesterday’s Vanilla Ice. As with the 1999 pagejacking case mentioned above, it has been long rumored that Bowie/Queen vs. Van Winkle was also settled outside court walls.

If you find the content you suffered Blood, Sweat, and Tears to create has been pagejacked, I recommend spending a few minutes reminding yourself that some of the greatest writers, both authors of book and song, have had their compositions copied.

Then, ask the pagejacker to remove the jacked content within 48 hours or they’ll find themselves "under pressure" from your attorney.

Pagejacking and Vanilla Ice
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April 27, 2006

Doctors, Prostates, Web Development, & SEO Companies

I had lunch last week with a friend who shared an interesting story. He went to see his family physician for a routine physical. His family doc did the physical and took some blood for a standard workup based on my friend’s age. The physical went extremely well and his doctor said he was in great shape. A week later, the physician called my friend with the bloodwork results. One of the tests was related to the health of his prostate and this number was 3x higher than it should have been. My friend asked his family doctor what he should do and the doctor said to come into his office immediately and he’ll remove his prostate. When my friend asked if he had done any prostatectomies, the doctor said he did it all the time and even some of his literature heralded his proficiency at removing prostates.

Same story. Different friend…

The next day, I had lunch with another friend who shared a similar story. He went to work for a new company who gave him the task of finding vendors to build and market the company’s web site. He did some searching and found a very good web development company who built his new employer a very professional, well designed web site, perfect for the company’s target audience. After several months, the site was still looking great, but a look at the site’s analytics showed that the search engines hadn’t indexed any of the site’s pages and was receiving no traffic. My friend went back to the web development company and asked them what he should do and they said they would optimize his pages and submit them to hundreds of search engines. My friend remembered seeing that the company did have information on their site about optimizing web pages and doing search engine submissions.

I’ve met a few physicians that practice family medicine as well as surgery and they are damn good at both. But, they are rare jems and few and far betweeen.

My career includes several years working in the medical field. I worked closely with some highly skilled family physicians as well as urologists specializing in men’s health issues. The family docs took care of an enormous number of ailments, but always knew exactly when to refer patients to other physicians who focused their work specifially on particular health ailments. The referrals were unidirectional as the Urologists didn’t practice family medicine – they left that to their highly trained colleagues.

Of course, this not unique to the health system I worked in. This referral network is based on rock-solid collegial respect and has a history with firm roots. It has worked for many, many years and will continue to do so.

Although we see a lot of stories as described above, we frequently get web development inquiries and have successfully networked with a few companies that take care of these inquiries as well as our clientele when they have unmet web development needs.. These same companies call on us when their client sites need traffic from search engines.

I propose that more web development companies and SEO companies plant more seeds together and start growing a similar network.


Doctors, Prostates, Web Development, & SEO Companies
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March 14, 2006

Pithy Comments About SEO Tools

There are a lot of SEO Tools available to both “in-house� SEOers as well as agencies like ours that specialize in SEO. There are tools for nearly everything – from keyword research tools all the way to Google vs. Yahoo SERP comparison tools. We’ve even created our own helpful tools to assist us in directing client campaigns.

The success of some very good SEO tools has been a catalyst for a plethora of SEO tools being created and made available online. Some of these are unique and useful, many are simply “me too / jump on the bandwagon� applications, and some are really not tools at all but rather experimentations. The latter group are the ones that you say “Cool!� when you see them, followed by “What exactly is that?", then you never visit them ever again.

Here’s my pithy comments about SEO tools...

If you are going to throw an SEO tool out to the public, please make sure it works. And if it’s broken, at least put up a notice on your site that it’s temporarily unavailable.

I visited two of the most popular online SEO tools this week and both of them had major problems. One didn’t work at all and the other gave incorrect results.

Crippled SEO tools reflect poorly on your company and our industry. If you are doing SEO in-house, make sure to verify some of the results provided by your frequently visited SEO tools.

Pithy Comments About SEO Tools
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March 6, 2006

Amazon and the Anti-Cloak

I found something interesting poking around between Google and Amazon.

If you go to this page at Amazon, you'll see a page devoted to a specific book about C# programming.

But if you arrive at that same Amazon page via a Google search for [c# programming] - my search shows the Amazon page at spot 9 - the page contains additional dynamic data that suggests Amazon is integrating the Google search query into the HTML.



When you arrive via Google, the first "special" area appears near the top - a gray bar just under the Amazon search box - showing other related searches that a user might be interested in.

A little later on, Amazon does a similar job, using a variation of the technique that has doubtless made them millions of additional dollars over the years: the old "customers who bought this title also bought..." spiel:



Cloaking? Technically, yes. Google doesn't see either bit of query based data in its cached version of the page.

But it shows Google less data than it shows the user, so there's very little chance that this technique is helpful from a purely SEO-based perspective. No, this is user-focused, all the way. And it's another reason why blanket, binary statements like "cloaking is bad" do everyone from webmasters to SEO practitioners a giant disservice.

Amazon and the Anti-Cloak
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February 22, 2006

Revisiting 404 Error Pages That Show 200 Codes

We just keep running into clients whose error pages return incorrect (either 200 or 302-then-200) header codes. Because Google Sitemaps won't let you validate a sitemap file if your server is misconfigured, I thought it was worth another mention.

Johannes Meuller has an excellent article about making sure that your error pages return the correct codes. Unlike a lot of articles in the genre, it gives specific code to fix the situation, covering Windows ASP and Apache servers as well as PHP pages.

As I pointed out here, there are reasons beyond Google Sitemaps for making sure your error page(s) return the correct 404 error code.

If you're in doubt about your error page header codes, test it by plugging in a "fake" URL from your site (such as www.domain.com/xxxxxxx) into a header checker tool. Rex Swain has one of the best. Don't let looks deceive you. Plenty of custom error pages LOOK like they're 404 pages (with all the requisite "File not found" terminology), but they're still throwing bad header codes.

Meuller, the article of the article above, is also the author of a terrific program that generates XML files for use as Google Sitemaps.

Revisiting 404 Error Pages That Show 200 Codes
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February 1, 2006

Dynamic URL Rewriting Done Right

A recent press release announced Biblio.com selecting Intrapromote as their SEO partner.

Biblio.com touts 30 million used books, rare books & out-of-print books. You can imagine the mass quantity of database driven dynamic URLs on a site the size of Biblio.com.

It's no secret that some search engines still stub their indexing toe on dynamic urls, especially wildly dynamic URLs. Invented and originally written in 1996, a URL rewriting program called Mod Rewrite is perhaps the most popular URL rewriting program available today. We've recommended it to hundreds of site owners since our inception in 1999.

Mod Rewrite uses a rule-based rewriting engine to rewrite dynamic URLs on the fly. That may sound fairly simple, but it's not for the technical faint at heart. The good news, however, is the end result which can be the transformation of a dynamic URL into a static URL such as:

http://www.biblio.com/books/64717327.html

Sure beats:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE47818D34CAE7020C5872C46DCA66AD21AD74FEC8B0C234341C5B8344C840C38E253F8958FEAAC7CB771CC8A62A6450ECCC8EE56FA9067373E84E4A262284F36&sql=11:eiaxlfhe5cqu

And search engines gobble up that beautifully rewritten URL (insert Pac Man "whacka whacka" sound)! Well done Biblio.com!

For more on Mod Rewrite, we recommend:

Beginner's Guide To Mod Rewrite
Mod Rewrite Forum
Mod Rewrite Original Apache Documentation
Mod Rewrite Tips and Tricks

Dynamic URL Rewriting Done Right
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January 18, 2006

New Search Engine Market Share, Popular Search Terms Announced

Via Search Engine Watch, we find that Nielsen//Netratings has just released (PDF) November tallies for search engine market share and most popular search terms, as of November 2005. Without further ado:

Search Engine Market Share, November 2005

Engine	Share %	Total Searches (x1000)
Google	46.3	2,365,998
Yahoo	25.4	1,194,519
MSN	11.4	583,304
AOL	6.9	350,899
MyWay	2.5	129,555
Ask Jeeves	2.3	119,679
Earthlink	.6	32,172
Dogpile	.6	31,563
Netscape	.6	30,434
iWon	.5	27,670

source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, January 2006

My initial thoughts here are that while the top three engines more or less maintained their share, Google's growing involvement with and potential influence over AOL could do real damage to Y and M and cause fewer and fewer people to believe it's still anyone's game. (And believing may be all it takes, as John suggested on Monday.)

In addition to the search engine market share numbers, N//N also released the top 10 search terms for November:

Top Search Queries for November, 2005 (US)

Search Term	Total Queries
"ebay"	13,871,000
"google"	13,301,000
"yahoo"	7,997,000
"mapquest"	7,431,000
"yahoo.com"	6,528,000
"pogo.com"	4,062,000
"walmart"	3,688,000
"ask jeeves"	3,389,000
"msn"	3,166,000
"ebay.com"	3,125,000

source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, January 2006

I guess I shouldn't always be so shocked at the number of people who use the Search box to type full or partial URLs.

Ken Cassar, chief analyst for Nielsen//NetRatings, had an interesting analysis of this segment (my emphasis added):

"There are two types of online searchers that type a Web site’s URL into a search engine rather than into the browser’s address bar: Those inexperienced enough not to appreciate the difference between the two, and those that are so experienced they have become habituated to using the search engine as their portal to the Internet.

Try as I might, I'm not sure I will ever buy the last part of that. It's like saying that I'm pushing my car down the street because I'm too savvy to drive it. I believe that truly savvy users have come to view the browser - not the search engine - as the portal to the Internet.

But Cassar ends with a note we can all live with:

Whether this behavior is driven by ignorance or savvy, the end result is the same: The search engine is the focal point of the online experience for Internet users across the spectrum.

Amen to that.

New Search Engine Market Share, Popular Search Terms Announced
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January 16, 2006

Do You Remember What You Used To Think?

Mark Naples makes a search perception argument this Friday last that I have to admit hurt my brain, and one from which I have since been unable to recover. Namely, that Google at the beginning really wasn't as great as everyone thought it was, it's just that everyone thought it was:

It can be because of a very elemental tenet of marketing, and, in fact, of all communications, especially public relations: perception is reality. It's not as important that Google's results were better as it is that media, analysts, IT guys, and other influencers thought that Google's results were better.

Since I read that I have been trying to remember, with as pure a conscience as I can muster, what exactly it was I thought about Google at the very beginning and, essential to Naples' argument, whether I was right or just wrongly influenced by peers and, even more strangely, my own influence among influencers.

Perhaps I was simply projecting my own desire to be counted among the influencers, indeed litmus-testing my own worthiness of inclusion in that august group, when I would perform early searches at the new Google. That's a very difficult onion to unfurl, and one for which I may need to seek therapy.

Dammit, though, I really do remember thinking Google's results were a revolution at the time. Especially against what had become utterly useless results for any given search at say, Alta-Vista, Infoseek, and Excite, just to call to mind the barren search landscape Google was born into. Remember trying to find anything useful there?

So now that Naples has stuck me in a memory glitch matrix, I find solace in the early happy opinions I have, or think I had, rightly or wrongly, about Google. I might even argue after a period of therapy to strengthen my resolve that without the revolution in useful and relevant results Google ushered in, we would still be stuck in that warp of online time where media, analysts, IT guys, and other influencers, Naples' magic group which allegedly started the whole misperception to begin with, were the only ones who attempted to use search as equipment for living in much the same manner as the connected world at large now does, in greater numbers each Month.

So did Google make search accessible as equipment for living and it was just that the above magic group was the first in the world curve to grasp it, or was it all just a conspiracy to make it seem that way so those outside the golden circle would ape their attitudes and actions? Would we be where we are now without the revolution having been based on relevancy, but merely perception?

Do You Remember What You Used To Think?
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January 10, 2006

The Case for Long-term SEO

A few weeks ago, Doug posted about long term SEO and the benefits to companies that are committed to it.

Colin Christofferson of Optimize the Enterprise responded:

One thing that we struggle with here is trying to understand if we are staying "ahead of the curve." Essentially, if we did nothing else, search traffic to our site would grow simply because the web and search are growing. We want to know if we are outpacing that, and it is often difficult to report on.

He followed up with his own post that furthered the question:

I want to be able to measure my impact relative to the web as a whole. Search referral growth of 30% year-over-year seems great, unless the growth of search usage has jumped by 70% web-wide! It is important that we actually gain new mind and market share through search.

All very good points, worthy of some follow-up. Honestly addressing Colin's comments forces us to ask a few important questions:

• What is the growth rate of the internet overall, and of search engine use in particular?
• If I optimized a site and did absolutely nothing afterward, wouldn't I achieve natural growth on pace with the growth of the internet and search engine usage?
• How do we tell if our growth is outpacing our industry's?

To answer the questions, we need to look at some statistics. Wherever possible, I used the range of 2000-2005 as the comparison points.

• From 2000-2005, worldwide internet "usage" grew about 170%. (As you can imagine, the numbers vary wildly by continent, but I want to work with averages.)
• In 2000, search engines were responsible for about 7% of site referrals.
• Today, the average percentage of search-based traffic is quite difficult to determine. Our clients run the gamut, from about 15% to over 80%, depending on their vertical market and additional on- and offline marketing efforts. (Note: If 100% of your traffic comes from search engines month after month, you have a problem, and you ought to know why.)

So Colin's thoughts are panning out. Year over year, we have steady increase in the percentage of each country's population that uses the internet. On top of that, a greater and greater percentage of that user base turns to search each year to find what they're looking for.

So even if you stop optimizing, should your search traffic grow at a rate similar to the pace of the Internet, and more accurately, at the rate of search engine use? In a vacuum, perhaps. But there's one more important number we need to look at:


• Based on domain registrations (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and edu), the number of actual web sites from 2000-2005 increased by about 364% (roughly 10M to 46M domains). So while many more users are out there, and many more of them are using search to find sites, the sheer number of sites competing for those eyes has increased greatly too.
  

(The standard disclaimers apply: Many of those are probably parked. Many are garbage sites. Etc. But you see where I'm going.)

Sites like Apple will never have trouble with traffic growth for queries like [ipod]. But few of us, including what we consider some big, big names, have a computational grip on our markets (and our resellers) like Apple does. So that leaves the "rest of us." How do we know if we're out performing our industry? Here are some possible ways.

• Watch your list of referring keywords. The total number of referring phrases should grow each month. But don't expect this to happen unless you focus on creating new content regularly, and you ensure that it's easily crawled and indexed. If your traffic grows with the "same old" set of keywords each month, that's probably a sign of simply rising with the tide of new users.
• Watch the sites within your industry. Are your competitors showing up on more and more results pages? Are there "new kids on the block" that seem to have come out of nowhere who are taking some of your traffic, yet you still see growth? Chances are you need to work harder.
• I've never been totally convinced that the Alexa toolbar is accurate for monitoring one site's traffic, but I think it can be fairly useful for watching the relative growth of a group of sites. How have you fared against your top five competitors over the last 6 months?

To test this global thesis fairly, we'd need to compare two identical sites - one that stays static, and one that regularly adds content, pursues relevant links, and breaks down crawling obstacles. Anything you do to your site ideally knocks you out of the first group, so Colin is right - it's very difficult to report on.

To all this, I should add that in some markets, you shouldn't even expect industry-average growth to continue of you stop optimizing. We see plenty of sites that were kings and queens of their respective counties after optimizing a few years ago, who have seen raw search numbers steadily decline since. They're not even staying flat. And that's happening in more and more verticals all the time.

So stay on top of your SEO game. People are still coming online and searching in numbers too great to ignore, and it's up to you to make sure your growth outpaces theirs.

And thanks, Colin, for thought-provoking questions.

The Case for Long-term SEO
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January 9, 2006

Historical Search Traffic - Are You Missing The Boat?

In my last post, I asked the question: "Is your Search Traffic growing Big Time?"

Notice I didn't ask, "Are your search engine placements growing Big Time?" Why? Because your search engine placements are just a means to an end for what you should really be seeking ... target audience visits clicking through to your site from your search engine placements.

If you're not analyzing your search engine traffic at least monthly, the boat has left the dock without you. Make sure you have a web analytics program that provides search engine referrer data. This way you will always know exactly how many visitors find your site through each search engine. Then meticulously track your Search Traffic at least monthly over the long haul.

Here's an example from a client who fits my "7 Characteristics Of Companies That Have Committed To Ongoing SEO". Let's take a look at their Search Traffic for Google, Yahoo, and MSN in 2005:



If you're analyzing your Search Traffic monthly, then you have the advantage of being able to compare it to prior years. Here's what this client's search traffic looked like the prior year (2004):



Now let's go back another year and look at 2003:



There are many observations that can be made from analyzing three years of historical search traffic. Here are just a few:

* Google brings significantly more visitors to this site than Yahoo and MSN. In fact, currently Google traffic is approximately the equivalent of Yahoo and MSN combined.

* Since January 2003, traffic from Google has grown from under 50,000 to nearly 800,000 monthly visitors.

* This client definitely has a seasonal trend to it's Search Traffic with small decreases in search traffic in January and February that recover in March and April, flatten our over the early part of the Summer, then take off in the Fall and reach their peak in December.

The analysis and observations can go on and on. My main point is that we can use this data to make significant strategic decisions about our SEO efforts. And our client can use it to make meaningful e-business decisions that affect their bottom line.

Every site owner should be analyzing their Search Traffic and using whatever intelligence this brings to the table. Be happy about good search engine placements, but be excited about Search Traffic that is growing big time!

Historical Search Traffic - Are You Missing The Boat?
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December 20, 2005

Google Search Results in a Wiki Thicket

Oilman got a hot tip about a new UI test involving Google results pages.

He points out that appending the terms "information" or "info" to simple concepts (such as [typing info], [driving information], and so on) often triggers the serving of the Wikipedia definition of that term as the top Google result.

I did more poking, and not only does it occur in a ton of different searches, but that result is also given a font size boost, and in some cases, a placement boost (see the Adidas example later in this post). For example, a typical Google descriptive "snippet" has a font size of "-1". The Wiki results don't have that attribute, resulting in text size that is the same as the blue title text. Following is the top result at Google for [airline information]:



It's hard to get excited about this; the result above is unlikely to be helpful to anyone older than nine.

Historically, Google has had an interesting relationship with "information"-based queries, often producing pages from Answers.com or Business.com in the top spot for brand-focused queries such as [adidas information]. (Note that in this search, the Wiki result surpasses even the Froogle results.) But Wikipedia appears to be the new authority in town, doubtless leaving Answers.com wishing it had ... answers.

Due mostly to its raison d'etre of offering real-time edits by anyone, Wikipedia has had its share of negative press this year, including controversies surrounding former MTV veejay (and current Podcast evangelist) Adam Curry; former assistant to Robert Kennedy, John Seigenthaler; and even Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales.

A bit of good news came recently, however, when a study by the journal Nature put Wikipedia on par with Encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of accuracy:

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

So for better or worse, Wikipedia isn't going anywhere. For SEOs and their clients, the pressing concern is whether its rise to fame hinders their branding message, and if so, how they're going to handle it.

Google Search Results in a Wiki Thicket
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December 16, 2005

Search Engine Traffic Growing - Big Time!

Peter Gabriel's 1986 hit "Big Time" has a line in the first verse:

"I'm gonna watch it growing - Big Time!"

I doubt Peter was thinking about search engine traffic when he wrote "Big Time". But I think of this song and lyric often. Especially as we close out another year and take time to compare search traffic numbers historically for many of our clients. After all, a significant portion of SEO's bottom line is getting target audience visitors to your site from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

I want to tip my cap today to companies that have embraced search engine optimization for the long term. Too many companies take a half-hearted attempt at SEO ("Just have the web guy throw some keywords in there"). I've also seen companies with sites that change frequently, that think a one-time SEO project is all they need.

Here are 7 common characteristics of companies big and small that have committed to ongoing site optimization and are reaping the reward of steadily increasing search traffic:

1. They understand the search behavior of their target audience. They know exactly how potential customers are using search engines to seek out their products and services. They understand that search behavior can be dynamic...yes, they even know how their target audience searches during different times of the year!

2. They are flexible with their site content. They will even add a content-rich page to their site if an important keyword phrase is identified and there is no existing page on the site focused on that phrase.

3. They understand that it's easier and smarter to optimize a new page on their site during the development process, not afterward.

4. They have web analytics programs that provide search engine referrer data so they always know exactly how many visitors find their site through each search engine.

5. They understand the importance and necessity of having high quality incoming links from other sites.

6. Their copywriters effectively balance the "voice" of the site with search behavior intelligence. Their "art" isn't a higher priority than allowing people to find and visit their site.

7. Their search traffic over the long term contines to grow and grow and grow...

If I can take some liberty with Peter's closing lyric:

"My search traffic is getting bigger!
Big Time!
And my bank account!
Big Time!"

Is your search traffic growing big time? Are you a company like the one described above? In my next post, look for some nitty gritty historical search traffic data from such a company.

Search Engine Traffic Growing - Big Time!
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December 6, 2005

To Tag or Not To Tag Your Vegetables

Coming on the heels of the much ballyhooed Tivo announcement that ads will now be searchable, it was titillating to follow David Berkowitz's prognostication of where this would all spill.

In the second-to-penultimate paragraph of this erotic thriller we reach what has to be a climax for all in our industry:

Searching within a map, a PDF, and even a PC desktop was much more cumbersome only a few years back. A former iCrossing colleague, Sara Holoubek, often illustrated the imminent pervasiveness of the Internet by noting how computers will one day be commonly built into refrigerators. By that example, searching the contents of your kitchen from a refrigerator-based console is hardly far-fetched (and given the difficulty I had finding ingredients when baking a kugel last weekend, it's a development I'd welcome).

The cold water splashed on this rock and roll search fantasy? I suspect spam will be a problem.

To Tag or Not To Tag Your Vegetables
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November 21, 2005

Classic Rock Web Design

We here at the 'wagon, among other things, are devoted to quality web content and quality music. We keep our standards high in both aspects and I was reminded of these two ideals one recent morning when a strange "alignment of stars" if you will took place. As I was starting my day two unique and unrelated events took place, and my brain, badly needing coffee (obviously) took it from there.

What happened? Well, I came across a printout that my wife had accumulated in her pursuit of her Masters degree. Isn't it funny that as I wax eloquently and proudly about her Master's degree in Health Education that I'm eating Nilla wafers and was disappointed that we're out of store bought mini-muffins - but I seriously digress. And as I was selecting some music to listen to first thing in the morning from Yahoo Music I had an inkling to listen to some classic rock, namely Led Zeppelin. But what I found on Yahoo Music was that the only thing available was a karaoke version of their greatest hits. I was disappointed at first but found that I could appreciate the songs for just their music, words weren't really necessary to qualify it as good music. Their just the icing on the cake.

The printout that I came across dealt with web credibility guidelines [http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html]. The guidelines are a very common sense, albeit outdated in "internet years" (internet years are a lot like dog years), approach to website design and content. One of our main jobs is getting traffic to our clients websites, but keeping them there is equally important. Just as traffic can be driven to a site using various methods, commonly referred to in search engine land as Black Hat and White Hat (a reference to the old cowboy movies where the good guy wore the white hat etc.), your sites content can be derived from many different methods. And as important as proper, ethical, white hat techniques are to good long-term sustainable SEO results, so is good quality content that is easy to use important to your website visitors.

So as I was listening to the Led Zeppelin karaoke music, I was in awe of the musical genius that put together the original arrangements. I realized that even though I love Robert Plant's vocals, I equally love just the plain old music by itself. The seamless integration of musical chord's, tempo's, beat's, etc. make Led Zeppelin the classic rock band that it is. That's why I'm still drawn to it, and why I inherently like or dislike certain websites. If they follow the guidelines they are bound to be classic's.

One more comparison and then I promise I'll finish. Led Zeppelin wasn't the most complex or overproduced band in the world, they just rocked. A classic website doesn't have to have the fanciest flash in the world or be filled with all kinds of cool interactive mouse-over's. It needs to be correct, usable, & useful. Pleasing to the eye is nice, but let's remember the phrase "eye candy" and not let it rule the web world and rot out the core of what is good for quality web sites.

So with all that being said, and I apologize in advance for what you're about to read, let your content and SEO be excellent, thus combining for your online.........wait for it.........stairway to heavenly results.

Classic Rock Web Design
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November 4, 2005

Content Management Systems and SEO

Are you considering a Content Management System (CMS) for your site?

I've seen many Content Management Systems in my day. The main purpose of a CMS is so that site owners can make changes to the content of their web pages without having to ask their Webmaster to program the changes. You log in, find the page you want to change, make the changes to text on your page, log out, and your changes are live.

One important thing to understand: There's a reason it's called a "content" management system. It's focus is on the content of your site, not the code.

If you're considering a CMS for your site, from an SEO perspective, there are two important questions to ask:

1. How can I change my title tags and meta tags (code)?

If a client is considering a move to CMS, we've learned to ask right away how title tags and meta tags will be changed on the site. And we've heard more than once, "Oh, you can't change those." Ouch.

Make sure while gaining flexibility to change text on your pages that you're not giving up the ability to make changes to your titles and metas.

2. What will my URLs look like?

A CMS can be paired with wildly dynamic URLs that search engines have difficulty crawling and indexing. Make sure that the CMS produces search-engine-friendly URLs.

Know of an SEO-friendly CMS? I welcome your comments below.

Content Management Systems and SEO
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November 2, 2005

Yahoo Announces Algo Update

Tim Mayer at Yahoo announced a new weather report late last night:


We will be making changes to the ranking of our index tonight. I would expect that this update will be mild and quick compared to recent ones but will impact the ranking of some sites.

So keep an eye on your Yahoo SERPs.


As an aside, we applaud the glasnost of the Weather Report concept, as pioneered by Yahoo. Google obviously agrees, since Matt Cutts has also been very good lately at mapping out the rollouts of Google algo updates. It appears the major engines have decided (rightly) that announcing updates ahead of time helps webmaster relations and PR (public relations, silly) far more than it compromises any sort of corporate secrecy.

Yahoo Announces Algo Update
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October 28, 2005

The Search Engine Hot Dog Derby

I've always wondered why Major League Baseball teams can't come up with better between-inning entertainment for fans. Each Spring and Summer I spend a lot of time at Jacob's Field in Cleveland and even the folks that organize the breaks in action for my beloved Tribe bat about .125 in the entertainment category.

But rather than focus on the negative, I must tip my cap for the Kiss Cam where random, generally unsuspecting couples are selected and urged to smooch. At least watching the awkwardness between complete strangers who are being coerced by thousands, nearly obligated to kiss is interesting and somewhat entertaining.

Beyond the tip of the cap, I tip my cap and dramatically salute the Hot Dog Derby! I'm not sure exactly why the hot dog derby is so fun. Perhaps it's just me, but there's something exhilarating about three hot dogs up on a huge LCD screen racing around the bases - one with ketchup, one with mustard, and one with onion.

As derby announcer Frank Furter calls the race, the fans go wild picking a dog and urging it on, hopefully, to a victory. Some people I know, not me of course, have been known to call out, "Run Mustard Run!", "Onion Sucks!", and various other wiener chants. No one seems to care that it's just a computer program with a predetermined winner.

So I'm sitting on a plane heading to L.A. and my mind wanders to my place of tranquility, Jacob's Field, where I'm enjoying the hot dog derby. I guess it was the transition from there to listening to Danny Sullivan's Daily SearchCast that made me realize that the search engine race between Google, Yahoo, and MSN is a lot like the hot dog derby.

In the Search Engine Marketing business, especially those of us that were bit by the SEO bug back in the 90's (a.k.a., the old folks), we're constantly watching, intensely monitoring ... weekly, daily, even by the minute ... this race between the search engines. We can be a bit like search engine paparazzi or search engine groupies.

Let's take this one step further. C'mon. Oblige me...

Google is definitely the dog with Ketchup. Ketchup has an impressive track record, is the fan favorite, is almost always out in front and wins consistently. It’s name alone is in the Brand Eponym Hall of Fame with the likes of Kleenex, Xerox, Coke, and Band-Aid.

Yahoo is definitely covered in Mustard. A tenured dog with a loyal fan base, if Yahoo buys AOL, it becomes Spicy Brown.

MSN is the dog smothered in Onion. Leaky eyed fans of this dog rarely select it without Ketchup or Mustard. Certainly the "underdog", I must admit I have a hard time not rooting for Onion -- which comes natural to an Indians fan.

So who's your dog?

I find myself still using 'ole reliable Ketchup, but recently I've found myself sampling more Mustard and some occasional Onion.

And who ultimately wins this derby?

None of our three main Condiments are going away anytime soon. And who knows, 2006 may be the year Relish joins the race. Likely, no one wins all the customers in the end. We'll just stay right here on the edges of our seats enjoying the race.

"Go Onion!"

The Search Engine Hot Dog Derby
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October 26, 2005

Google Organic Search: Will the Rich Get Richer?

One of this week's Google buzz topics is the testing of a new airline reservation interface, which appears when a query phrase contains iterations of two major cities:



Similar results appear for the queries [los angeles new york] or [flight from los angeles to new york], so Google is allowing some latitude in the required syntax.

This is almost certainly a UI experiment on Google's part, and will probably disappear without any notice and head back to the shop for retooling. For now, however, a few characteristics stand out:


• The links (as shown in the screen shot) appear organic, not paid. So the big question for now is, how does Google decide which three (in this case) sites will be featured?
  
• The main link, titled "Flights from Los Angeles, CA to New York Kennedy, NY" links to the same page as the Expedia link directly below the date box. That actual title, however, does not come from that Expedia page. I suspect it is a title formula created by Google for this specific type of search result, since the same format appears in searches for different cities.
  
• The pre-loaded depart/return dates (two weeks out - in this case, 11/10-11/17) appear to be random as none of the three sites listed below the date boxes have presumed dates of departure and return on their home pages. The presumed duration of the trip is one week, regardless of whether both points are intra- or intercontinental.
  
• It probably goes without saying, but clicking from this SERP over to Expedia, Hotwire, or Orbitz forces a search for the specified airports on the specified dates. Programmatically, linking to a dynamic, as-yet-uncreated page is a notch or two more complicated than simply showing additional links for a top result in other searches (which we've written about before), such as the following:



Study after study shows the benefits of a first-place listing on the Google results page - even without interface enhancements like these. When you throw additional links or an intuitive industry-specific feature into the equation, the benefits are exponential. It's useless to label this phenomenon "good" or "bad" because depending on your current positioning, you already know which one it is.

Google Organic Search: Will the Rich Get Richer?
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October 24, 2005

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Poetry

Hey all! It's a Monday morning and I'm feeling a wee bit geeky today. So, I decided to write some poetry about Natural SEO rankings. I hope everyone enjoys!


Here goes...

Ranking Lovin'

I'm getting some rankings now
titles and metas helped
content gave the message
but links had to be developed
external linking growing
I'm getting anxious and can wait no longer
two months have gone by now and finally the traffic is getting stronger
look at all these orders
it was all a matter of time
the search engines updated their index and the profit is all mine


I have several other poems I wrote as well, and of course, do intend on sharing them with y'all in due time. Yeah, I know I'm an SEO geek. But chances are so are most of you who are reading this entry. My next poem will be aptly named "Link Building Love." Let me know what y'all think

Peace!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Poetry
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October 13, 2005

Google Cache Limit

Has anyone else noticed Google has a VERY nice cache file limit these days? Well, I've noticed Google having increased cache file size for some time now and wanted to share the knowledge with those of you who may not be in the know.

Check this out! Here is an example of two pages from the same domain indexed at Google with file sizes of 2,661kb & 1,422kb!




What's really cool about increased cache limit at Google (I don't think Google even has one anymore) is that webmasters and site owners alike no longer have to worry about keeping their page file size under 101k in order to have their pages fully indexed at Google.

The days of 101k limits are dead and a new dawn of big files getting indexed at Google has already arrived.

Google Cache Limit
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October 12, 2005

Diagnosing Crawling and Indexing Issues with Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo recently released the Yahoo Site Explorer, a very helpful way to diagnose issues that may be hampering your performance in Yahoo natural search.

Enter a URL in the Search box, and Yahoo returns two values: First, the number of indexed pages for a given site, and as a second option, the number of incoming links pointing at that site. The following image shows the location of the key data points.



Drilling down, you can select specific URLs from the results page, and "explore" those pages in depth - finding, for example, the number of pages from a specific section of your site that have been indexed, or the incoming links pointing to a specific page of your site. To find an index count for a specific site section, enter or click a URL such as http://www.site.com/press/. This returns indexing and linking results for this specific URL, as well as any pages in the /press/ directory.

Unlike Google, which purposely returns only a percentage of a site's incoming links, Yahoo Site Explorer claims to show all incoming links that it knows about. This can come in very handy when performing a competitive link analysis for sites in your industry.

One of Site Explorer's largest drawbacks is the ability to download only the first 50 results into TSV format, for import into programs like Excel. It would be wonderful to have an entire site's worth of data to sort and play with in a spreadsheet program, but it's unlikely that Yahoo is too eager to spend processing time creating TSV files with tens of thousands of rows. A resourceful programmer named John Mueller has used the Yahoo Search API to create a custom version of Yahoo Site Explorer that overcomes some of these common obstacles; it's worth a look.

If you find large blocks of URLs from your site that Yahoo has not indexed, it offers a submission system similar to that of Google Sitemaps. You can simply fill a text file (such as pages.txt) with the URLs you want Yahoo to index, separated by a hard return. Upload the text file to your web server, then submit the entire URL of the text file (such as http://www.site.com/pages.txt) to the Yahoo Free Submit page.

We don't yet have significant data on the crawl rate for URLs submitted via this method, but we'll be sure to publish any information we collect.

Diagnosing Crawling and Indexing Issues with Yahoo Site Explorer
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October 7, 2005

Hello Potential Customer, Please Call Back

I called a business today.

No human beings answered. However, the voice mail system was available to me...good thing eh?

The voice mail system went through it's robotic pleasantries, then told me:

"If you are calling about X, call back later."

Dang. I was calling about X. And I'm not going to call them back.

Later during the day, I was talking to a prospective client about their web site. They have a wonderful site full of great content. But, they were spending 100% of their marketing budget on email marketing.

Absolutely nothing had been done to their site to help it perform for natural search queries. Even their page titles were just their company name.

It reminded me of my call earlier in the day.

If you are putting all your internet marketing eggs in baskets other than natural SEO, when someone searches for your offerings at Google and your site isn't at least on page #1, in effect, you're telling that potential site visitor:

"Hello potential customer. I understand you are calling about my product or service."

And instead of providing them an open door to your site, you are really saying:

"Call back later." And like me, most of them won't be calling you back.

Hello Potential Customer, Please Call Back
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October 4, 2005

Hiring an SEO Company: We're Ready - Are You?

SEO clients, I don't envy you.

Everyone's out to get you, and I'm not kidding. Your competition is tough - almost as tough as your affiliates. Search engine optimization firms are full of worthless, shady criminals. Can you believe any of us when we talk about "SEO Ethics" when behind your back, you're the object of scorn and ridicule? And don't get me started on cost. We're either prohibitively expensive or suspiciously cheap.

Nervous laughter aside, once companies make it through the minefield of selecting a decent SEO firm, they often become their own worst enemies. Doug foreshadowed it a few weeks ago, but it was reinforced just last week as Chris Sherman summarized the iProspect Outsourced SEO Metrics & ROI Study (PDF):


Just over a third of respondents said that there were no obstacles to implementing search engine optimization. However, fully 64% of organizations outsourcing natural search engine optimization to an SEO firm encounter obstacles within their own organization that got in the way.
The two biggest obstacles were lack of human resources to implement changes (34%) and lack of outsourced IT budget (17%). However, this suggests that if a company lacks human resources to implement changes or a budget to outsource them, they are not being well-served by their current search marketing firm.

The emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. Notice the lack of judgment in Chris's use of passive voice. He's not saying that the SEO company is giving the shaft to the client - only that, empirically, when the client does not make the recommended changes (for any reason), it is not getting its money's worth.

The study itself ably points out why recommendations aren't made, and the fault lies with both SEO firms and potential clients. In addition to the two reasons quoted above, some of the key factors preventing the implementation of SEO firms' changes include:


• Upper management decision not to implement the recommendations
  
• Branding issues / restrictions
  
• Agency failed to educate my company on the required resources to implement recommendations

So who's guilty here? The potential client, for not doing its homework and asking the right questions, or the SEO firm, for poorly explaining the processes and resources required? Yes and yes.

So let's get this out in the open and put it behind us. In most cases, organic SEO is going to consume significant staff hours on the implementation side - your side. While we will work with design and marketing departments to reach as effective a compromise as possible, we're going to push for more content. And one of the most important things to realize is that in most cases, our recommendations, while itemized, are a package, and they rely on each other for overall effectiveness. If you make the title and content changes to 900 pages but refuse to allocate the staff-hours to the URL crawling and indexing issue, you've wasted our time - and your money. And you'll continue to call us worthless, shady criminals. And we'll continue to mock and scorn you. Let's not let that happen.

Hiring an SEO Company: We're Ready - Are You?
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October 3, 2005

Perception is Reality? Google Alerts

If you are reading this blog then chances are good that you have “Googled� yourself, friends, family, and others. Besides occasionally finding out something I didn’t know, this name surfing mainly turns up a lot of information that doesn’t pertain to my targeted search phrase. Now this post is not about relevance, that can be saved for another day, it’s about the phrase “perception is reality�.

What people see, hear, and read about you will shape their perception of you or your company even if they have never had any interaction with you or your company. To emphasize this point I will use myself as an example. I typed in my name as the search term in Google and according to the results that came back I am either:

1. Somehow related to an “entertainment� video for adults only
2. The Controller for Intrapromote LLC
3. A sex offender from Muncie Indiana

Now I recognize that most fair minded people would be able to pick out the real me, but all of the disgusting stuff around the real me may lead some astray in their perception of who I really am. This can, and does, occur often with the ever-growing use of the Internet as a source of reference.

So how to combat this and put forth your best foot? Well, the first thing to do is to see what is out there associated with your name. A good tool for this is Google’s Alerts. With this free service you can get snippets of what Google indexes with your specific search term(s) delivered directly to you via email. Now this is not only a good first step in determining your online presence, it is a good ongoing tool to keep a pulse on your online presence.

I’ve used an example of a person search, but the same holds true for company search as well. With billions of pages indexed, there probably are many search results for your company’s name and/or products that may not present you in the best light.

Once you’ve determined what your actual online presence is, and you determine that you need to change it or even enhance it, I suggest that you consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. While nothing in this world is for certain, good SEO strategy, practices, implementation can greatly assist you in your never-ending quest to control the perception of who or what you are.

Perception is Reality? Google Alerts
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September 20, 2005

AOL/MSN vs. Google and Yahoo?

The Associated Press today is reporting that MSN and Time Warner (AOL) are in discussions about a potential partnership "...that would help the two companies better compete against rivals Google and Yahoo".

Also, "...one aspect of the talks centered on using Microsoft's new MSN search engine on AOL, replacing AOL's current relationship with Google."

It is certainly interesting to hear about these two (formerly?) bitter rivals talking about becoming partners in the battle against the big boys, Yahoo and Google.

We'll have more to say about this if the partnership looks like it will become a reality.


AOL/MSN vs. Google and Yahoo?
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September 16, 2005

Just Do It: Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly

Every day, senior level staff perform highly relevant queries at Google to see if the company’s site appears in the top few results. Upon seeing that the site isn’t on page #1 at Google, a good share of these folks become irritated and fire off an email, demanding an answer from the subordinate responsible for search engine marketing.

It may go something like this:

Linda,
We still are not in the top three at Google for “x�. Please advise ASAP!
Steve

...or...

Linda,
We are getting killed at Google by our main competitor. Please advise ASAP!
Steve

I’m convinced this happens hundreds of times each week in businessland.

From an agency who specializes in SEO, what we’ve seen many times is a tendency for some companies to practice selective listening when it comes to recommendations that require them to make critical changes to their site to improve its search engine friendliness.

Are you one of those frustrated senior level people?

Have your people or your SEO Firm recommended changes to your site to make it more spiderable or search engine friendly and it just hasn’t been implemented?

Are you sticking with the same site architecture and continuing to add pages to your site that handicap its search engine performance?

Should your next email be?…..

Hi Linda,
Let’s meet today about making those changes to make our site friendlier to the search engines.
Steve

Just Do It: Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
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September 12, 2005

ROI for Search Engine Marketing

Return On Investment (ROI) has been a key measurement of success ever since, dare I say, there has been commerce. ROI can be calculated many different ways, but the basis for every determination is the definition.

Whether you are the business owner or an e-marketing manager, correctly defining ROI for your campaign will help you to decide if you are meeting your goals. So, how should you define ROI for your campaign?

As stated earlier, ROI can be calculated many different ways. There are also many definitions for it ranging from technical accounting definitions to (in my view) simpler and more applicable investment definitions. One of my favorites, which captures the simplicity and essence of what most people identify with when they mention ROI, is this:

“The percentage of profit made on an investment.� (quoted from Cnet News.com Investor)

With this definition in mind, here are some basic guidelines for effectively using ROI as a measuring stick for the success of your campaigns.

1. Clarity:
I’m an accountant by trade. One of the things that I find that can cause confusion, disappointment, and even anger is when two (or more) people involved with the same investment have different measures of success. A quick example would be a campaign where one person’s view of a successful campaign might be site visitors who go past the landing page, while another’s view of success is how many site visitors see the landing page. This difference in goals can have a big impact on the focus and overall effectiveness of the campaign. The lesson here is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Don’t worry about clarifying or “over-communicating� your definition of success. Make sure everyone is on the same page. It is a good practice to actually list the definition of success along with the results of a campaign so that all can be clear about the definition.

2. Keep it simple:
When trying to calculate the success of a campaign, there will be lots of numbers and percentages. These are very important, but if not taken in doses, they can be overwhelming. Be careful to keep your definition of ROI handy when looking at all of these because they can divert your attention from your original goal and focus. Also, if your ROI calculation has too many variables, it could either point you in the wrong direction or simply be a waste of time. Try to trim down your calculation of ROI and see if there is a simpler, or shorter, way to come up with it. One final note, when looking for a shorter way to calculate ROI, keep in mind your margin for perfection, i.e., if you can get to within a certain % of your ROI number, and cut out 5 steps, or an hour of calculation time, it may be worth it. It’s also a good idea to re-visit #1 and keep everyone on the same page.

3. Try different measurements:
Perspective is an often overlooked and much maligned term. It is used a lot in this context: “to put it in perspective, we lost 5% more last period in this category as well�. If you try thinking of perspective like an artist who looks at things from more than one perspective, you may gather different understandings of the same thing. For example, I once was able to attend a professional basketball game and was privileged to sit in the second row. I had been to games before, but I was always much further away from the court and players. While in the “cheap seats�, I was in awe of how they moved and how they played, it seemed graceful and effortless. When I sat in the second row I was still in awe, but for different reasons. Now I could see how big the players actually are. From the cheap seats they were all together so they didn’t look any different than the people around them, but when I got up close I couldn’t believe how big they actually were. Needless to say, it squashed all of my fantasies in which I would imagine that “I could hang with them�. Not to say that they weren’t graceful, but suddenly they didn’t seem quite as graceful, nor did it seem effortless either. What changed? My perspective. In reviewing your campaign ROI, don’t be afraid to look at it from different perspectives. Be careful to make sure that your perspective matches your goal, or else you may end up with very incongruous results. By doing this, you may find benefits from the campaign that you never knew were there.

Finally, let me say the ROI can be a very effective, bottom-line, type of measurement for your campaign. Make sure due diligence is performed when determining how you are going to measure ROI before starting, and while planning, your campaign. This will help everyone involved to work together for the success of your campaign.

ROI for Search Engine Marketing
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August 26, 2005

SEO Ponderings: To H1 or Not To H1

The SEO Roundtable blog recently shared views from various SEO companies about using H1 tags in your text copy as an organic SEO technique. The idea is that search engines give more "weight" to text inside an H1 tag.

Of course, SEO company sentiments were mixed. Some SEOs roasted the H1's impotence. Others sung the H1's praises.

On our list of best practice SEO techniques, using H1 tags within text copy does not exactly make the SEO can of whoopass list. However, it is still on our official list of lower priority techniques. Here's an illustration of how we feel about lower priority SEO techniques like H1 tags:

Let's say that both you and your competitor have a web page optimized for the same exact keyword phrase. Let's also say that in the eyes of the search engine scorekeepers, it's a Mexican standoff...an undeniable tie. Ok, that's probably not going to happen, but bear with me.

Now, let's say that the only difference in your page and your competitor's page is that your text content includes appropriate H1 tags used in conjunction with your keyword phrase. Is it possible that the use of this lower priority SEO technique could bump your page higher than your competitor's page? In my opinion, yes.

Don't completely write off lower priority SEO techniques. Especially for your highly competitive keyword phrases where you need to bring your "A Game" when up against your competitor's similarly optimized page(s).

SEO Ponderings: To H1 or Not To H1
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August 25, 2005

So you think Meta tags are dead, eh?

I've heard and read that many SEO's and site owners feel writing meta tags is an exercise in futility. Is it really? Last I checked (which was about five minutes ago) Google is pulling meta descriptions quite a bit, especially for sites that lack good supporting content but have a good description within their meta description tag.

Here's a good exercise:

Go to Google and type in the keyword phrase [Nordstrom]. What you will find is, of course, Nordstrom.com sitting in the number one slot on the SERP. If you look at the description that appears for their listing on Google and reference their HTML code, you will notice the description matches their meta description perfectly and is clearly not anywhere to be found contextually on Nordstrom's homepage.

Another good example to try at Google is to check for the keyword phrase [yamaha motorcycles]. Once again, the most relevant site, Yamaha Motor, comes up in the number one slot. Here’s a site that has a lot of Flash elements and has virtually no supporting copy on the page itself. If you reference Google’s description on the SERP and compare it to the meta description, everything matches up.

DO NOT ignore the meta tags, especially the description tag! If you’re a site owner or have clients with little to no supporting copy on web pages, use Flash, etc., you want to make sure the engines will display the appropriate message when people such as myself are actively searching for your products, services, etc. The best way to ensure this is to have a clear and precise meta description.

Next time I post, I will be writing on meta keywords tags and will have more examples of SE’s using both Meta Keywords and Meta Description tags.

So you think Meta tags are dead, eh?
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August 18, 2005

The Difference Between Boy Dogs and Girl Dogs

My sons are a bit too old for books by Dr. Seuss and P.D. Eastman. But occasionally for fun, we pull one off the shelf and read it just for fun. We call it Retro Night.

Along with Seuss and Eastman, another Retro Night favorite is the potty training cliffhanger "No More Diapers". The boys always crack up when the little bear is finally awarded his "big boy pants". Come on, you remember that. It was a big deal!

But I digress. As a Dad, I'm allowed to do that when it comes to my boys.

P.D. Eastman Knows SEO

One night last week, the classic Retro Night book of choice was P.D. Eastman's "Go, Dog. Go! ". If you remember this story from your childhood, your first thought is probably the end of the story when the dogs, after going (Go, Dogs. Go!) and stopping (Stop, Dogs. Stop!) for roughly 60 pages, finally make it to their final destination - a raucous, tree-top dog party.

What does any of this have to do with SEO? Is mention of the dog party a lead into more thoughts on the Google Dance? That's tempting, but I won't go there.

If you're familiar with "Go, Dog. Go!" and are an SEO company like us, you may see where I'm going with this. Remember the Boy Dog and Girl Dog who meet and chat four times during the tale (pun intended)? The exchange always begins:

Girl Dog: "Do you like my hat?"

What a loaded question! In many households, Girl Dogs asking Boy Dogs about hats or other fashion-related items are quickly met with "Yes" or variations: "Very nice", "Looks good honey", and even "Perfect!"

But you can trust Eastman's Boy Dog to always tell the truth. Just like search engines when search engine optimizers bring their hats for the engines to review. Like the Girl Dog in "Go, Dog. Go!", we sometimes hear:

Boy Dog: "I do not like that hat. Goodbye!"

How about that for rude?

What's Wrong With Your Hat?

The search engine may not like your first hat and that's okay.

Is something missing from your hat?
Is your hat controversial?
Are you trying to get too fancy with your hat?
Is your hat too "cookie-cutter"?
Is your hat bloated with too much stuffing?
Do you have lots of well respected friends who recommend your hat?

Asking yourself questions like these will help when it comes to hearing what you want to hear from the "Boy Dog". If you do things right, you'll relate to the Girl Dog when after bringing three different hats to the Boy Dog for approval, on her final try, she pleads:

Girl Dog: "Now do you like my hat?"

The Boy Dog doesn't hesitate when he barks:

Boy Dog: "I do. What a hat! I like it! I like that hat!"

My boys always smile after that line.

Me too.

(Full book text: "Go, Dog. Go!")

The Difference Between Boy Dogs and Girl Dogs
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August 15, 2005

Introduction - My First Post To The Blog - A Few Things To Talk About

Hello everyone and welcome to SEO Speedwagon blog. I am James Gunn and I have been with Intrapromote for the past five years. I'll be posting here on the blog every week or two. I look forward to discussing many different topics related to search engine optimization with the "SEO Gearheads" as well as those who are new to the industry.





SEO Before the Site

I would like to start off today by mentioning the fact that I really feel some of the best SEO gains can be achieved before the site is constructed. With good planning, design and easy usability built in, your site is already headed in the right direction when it goes live.

That was easy to say, but takes a lot more time and effort to implement. It is, at times, a frustrating process when trying to combine a search engine friendly design strategy with the newest and greatest content management systems and their ability to make your life so much easier when maintaining your site.

We couldn't possibly get into every aspect of Search Engine Friendly Design in just this one blog post. If you are thinking about launching a site and would like to learn some of the fundamentals involved in the process. I would suggest doing some research on the topic. A very good place to start may be our good friend, Shari Thurow's book, titled Search Engine Visibility. I highly recommend this book as an excellent resource on the subject.

Sandbox. Aging Filter. Different Names, Same Result

Since we are on the subject of good reads. Scottie Claiborne recently wrote an article discussing the "sandbox" and how it may be confused with the "aging filter". This article brings up another important issue site owners may face when launching a new site and hoping for great results in Google soon after going live. Not to mention all that effort put into making those new Link-Building-Buddies (LBB). Hey, at least you made a lot of new friends and managed to meet a lot of very interesting people, right? ;-)

The "aging filter" definitely appears to be an attempt by Google to try and stay one step ahead of the link-spammers. I can't say I disagree with Google's attempt to do this. I do agree with Scottie when she says "If you are launching new sites for clients, make sure you set the expectation that it is likely to be 7-8 months before the site achieves any real results in Google." Her full article can be viewed @ Google's Aging Delay for New Domains, and yes, I highly recommend it.

Who Are You... Really?

Of course, how can we talk about the basics of SEO without bringing up the relevancy issue. The problems facing new site owners and their indexability in the search engines can be present at times and rather annoying to try and deal with, but are generally minimal.

One hurdle that can't be overcome though is the fact that non-relevant content is going to get you nowhere. Figure out your target audience, their search patterns (through research), associated traffic and how that relates to your conversion goals.

The end result of that process will be your targeted keyphrases. Now that you know what you should rank high for in the search engines. Set out to make your pages/site content and title tags relevant for those keyphrases.

If you go into the process knowing what your users are looking for, you can provide the proper content in a presentation those valuable users will prefer. Understanding search patterns can lead to more direct conversion paths and increase the likelihood of a high conversion rate (impacting your bottom line and ROI).

By doing this you are also helping the search engines determine who you are, how relevant you are, and where to place your site in their SERP's, Afterall, search engines are only looking to provide the most useful data they can to their users. If you determine that on your end before they have a chance to... it makes their job a lot easier.

"If it works for your users, it's good for the search engines" - Where have you heard that before? Of course, a bunch of us wrote a song about it... want to hear it?

Sure, basic stuff, but crucial. Our own VP, Erik Dafforn has an interesting article discussing the construction of Title Tags and the importance they play in making your content unique and relevant. Oh yeah... and I highly recommend it: Terrific Title Tag Tips

Links

Did I mention relevant links?


Happy Trails, Amigos!


James Gunn | Senior Campaign Director
I n t r a p r o m o t e | http://www.intrapromote.com
Search Agency for the World's Biggest Brands

Introduction - My First Post To The Blog - A Few Things To Talk About
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July 27, 2005

PPC & Organic SEO

I hear from advertisers all the time on how important it is to do Pay-Per-Click and see first hand how organic SEO is still being ignored by some of them. Yes, PPC search traffic is very important for increasing the number of qualified visitors to a website and really is the closest thing to instant gratification when it comes to getting good traffic to a website in a very short timeframe. By all means, PPC campaigns are critical to maximizing overall market share and SHOULD be utilized indefinitely as long as the ROI is intact.

What about the organic SEO side of things? Doesn't it make sense to focus a good chunk of your budget on driving potentially even more qualified search traffic to a website in natural search? Seeing how organic search listings are clicked on 60-70% of the time with PPC listings being clicked on the other 30-40%, it only makes sense to go after the natural search traffic while leveraging PPC campaigns.

What Intrapromote has found is that the most successful search engine marketing campaigns are with clients that utilize both Natural and PPC strategies. By utilizing both PPC and organic SEO, companies are focused on capturing 100% of the their targeted traffic potential as opposed to only going after the 30-40% of clickthrough potential associated with PPC listings.

PPC is a great way of impacting bottom lines, but for some of the marketers out there, you’re still only about 30-40% of the way to maximizing your returns.

PPC & Organic SEO
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