Search Engine Friendly Design Articles by SEO Speedwagon

May 2, 2009

Twitter Bookmarklets: Frame of Reference or Obloquy?

In my recent search for the perfect Twitter bookmarklet, one that would let me post from page without leaving nasty tracks in my Tweets, I noted a trend that all but BigTweet seemed to sow, in one shade or another; namely, the urge to take over and remake, to rendite, Cheney-like, beyond home:

The blue line above, spanning the horizon, demarcates the framing (or stealing) of the site URL Tweeted. True it is traded for providing the clicking Twit convenience, yet what does the site Tweeted get but a pageview in stats?

A RT, perhaps, but we know from usability that last in line isn't exactly the best place to be. Placement is illustrative in the above, as is color: anyone think the fading is an oversight?

Twitter Bookmarklets: Frame of Reference or Obloquy?
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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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January 16, 2008

Less Sponsored Ads = More PPC Revenue? Que Pasa, Google?

One of my favorite clients of all time, with us now going on 8 years and powered mightily by the rare, dual client-side SEO strengths of search understanding and inter-departmental implementation influence, recently noticed the same thing Mark Jackson saw in Google's most recent round of Universal Search peekaboo:

Notice the incredibly disappearing PPC Ads? My immediate explication was that surely this must be to prove, in a small test sample, that someone's bad idea from above would be a disaster, indeed.

Mark, though, has made me think again:

Google may succeed in encouraging companies to bid more ferociously for the top two positions. If universal search leads to more searches because it's fun, this could be a win for Google (higher revenues) and users (better experience).

Sometimes it's hard for us to imagine that there is a finite set of clicks on any given day. The business model in a closed set like this, then, must discover what to do to increase the value of the average click within the set on a given day. Mark's point about less ads likelier driving up value per is on target, I believe, but thanks to him getting me to think again I think the test layout in question has less to do about increasing searches "because it's fun" and much ado about that map, an image mind you, kissing the PPC ads at the right corner of the screen and making your eye immediately jump there to focus.

Take a look yourself and see where your eye is drawn, and then check out what eye tracking heat maps are telling us about how pictures affect focus on a search page.

Less Sponsored Ads = More PPC Revenue? Que Pasa, Google?
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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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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 24, 2007

Topix TLD Migration -- Six Months Later

I'm a big fan of Rich Skrenta, co-founder of NewHoo (née Gnuhoo, which eventually took the more recognizable name DMOZ), co-founder of Topix.net, and -- what may be the coolest of all -- author of one of the first known computer viruses, one of the few to be written before the actual term "computer virus" was even coined.

So that's all very cool, but the search-related part of all this was how, six months ago, Topix finally purchased the .com version of its domain and decided to make the move away from .net. The Wall Street Journal, in a mainstream SEO article that actually managed to hit most of the salient points pretty accurately, highlighted Skrenta's anxiety at the global domain change:

Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine -- and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. So the same user who typed "Anna Nicole Smith news" into Google last week and saw Topix.net as a top result might not see it at all after the change to Topix.com.

Like a lot of SEOs, at the time I wondered what was so "wrong" with the time-tested (at least in my experience) method of full-on 301 redirects from the old site to new -- especially since the code would be short and sweet, with each old .net URL going directly to its .com counterpart.

The Topix crew had apparently heard too many domain migration horror stories. On his own blog, Skrenta noted,

...there've been a whole bunch of the seo posts saying essentially "hey, it's easy to move a domain, you just 301 it." Of course I know about 301 and 302 redirects. The problem is that half of these people follow up and say "you'll only be out of the index for a few months". They also ignore the problems that big sites have. A redirect for a small site may work great, but if you have hundreds of thousands of pages or more, there are lots of cases where this caused some form of not-in-the-index-anymore doom.

The number of seo consultants who claim to know how to move a 100k+ page site is much smaller than the number who have actually done it.

That last point is a good one. Conventional wisdom in SEO is frequently spawned by 5% research and 95% extrapolation, which is often the best you can do. The other dirty little secret of SEO is that when you start seeing the same sort of anecdote often enough, it's tempting to put it in the "research" column.

Still, I'd not seen or heard of the type of monumental tragedies that Skrenta was talking about (at least within the last few years), and neither had Danny Sullivan:

I still remain surprised that the 301 is that much of a problem for even a big site. I just haven't heard of that trouble, of half the people saying you'll be out or whatever. If that's what you had been hearing, I can understand your concern. But it seems a pretty straight-forward change, and it shouldn't even be a burden on the server in that you're not actually talking about 100,000 of physical redirects that have to be created and check but a change of one domain to the other.

Ultimately, Topix listened to its heart (or maybe its board) and surprised me by opting for all-out duplication, running identical content on the .net and .com sites, avoiding any sort of redirection plan. So to call it a TLD migration isn't quite accurate. it's more like Topix.net bought a summer house and called it Topix.com. Again, from the WSJ article:

Concerned about that [redirection] strategy, Topix has run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile. One danger with that approach is that it is unpredictable; Google will see two versions of the same page and could choose to show the Topix.net page most prominently.

This course would appear to run contrary to the advice even Matt Cutts gave in the article:

Google's Mr. Cutts says the search engine should ultimately understand what is going on when a site changes its Web address. He says the best strategy is to move one section of the site to the new address and see what happens before switching the whole thing.

Skrenta has since left Topix, but the duplicated domain strategy hasn't. Go to any page on the Topix.net site, and you'll see that the exact same page exists on the .com version of the site. Currently, Google shows about 2 million Topix pages indexed on the .net TLD and about 1.2 million on the .com TLD.

So six months ago, had you asked any SEO "expert" about what to do, almost no one would have suggested the present course. But has it hurt anything? Maybe, maybe not. Topix.com has a PR6 home page with about 1.2 million inbound links, while Topix.net has a PR8 home page with almost 7.4 million inbound links. So at this point, in terms of raw accumulated power, consolidating those domains would create one very powerful site.

But would that be better than the current situation? Perhaps not. What about that "unpredictability" the WSJ (and zillions of SEOs) talk about with dupe domains? That even in the best case, Google will pick one page or the other at its own discretion -- and it might not be the one you want? Consider the SERP for [detroit local news]:

A page from Topix.net shows up in spot 8, and a page from Topix.com -- an exact mirror of the .net page -- comes in at spot 9. Not exactly Google choosing one over the other.

But if the pages are identical, why do they have different titles on the SERP? Because Topix.com is heavily linked to from DMOZ, and the .com page shown in this screen shot shows the title used on the Detroit News and Media category of DMOZ. This leads to a question: When Google pulls one page's title and/or meta description from DMOZ, does that override the duplication filter?

Detroit's hardly alone here. Do some searches yourself with a city name and "news" or "local news" and see for yourself.

There's really no moral to this story, other than every time something like this happens, the "guidelines" from engines lose more and more bite. I'm happy that (at least according to my superficial research) Topix is doing well; it's a great idea, smartly executed. But these SERPs are yet another frustrating case of mixed signals from engines.

In my opinion, in a case like this, once Topix owned the .com version, that was all that needed to happen. I don't think the .com even needed to have any content for the problem to be solved. Looking back, my advice would have been to keep all content on Topix.net and immediately set up a 301 from Topix.com to Topix.net -- the exact opposite direction that most people recommended. That way, the authority of Topix.net content would never have been in jeopardy, and any links that mistakenly found their way to Topix.com would immediately transfer link popularity (as well as the user) back to the main (.net) site. They could have even promoted the site as "Topix.com" with no major headaches. Almost no one would care (or even notice) if they were redirected, whether it was type-in traffic or someone that clicked over from a news story.

Topix TLD Migration -- Six Months Later
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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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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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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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January 12, 2007

Future-Proofing Your Site by Resolving at the Folder Root

It's become pretty common advice over the last several years to tell site owners to have their home pages resolve at the "root" (e.g., http://www.domain.com/) as opposed to some form of "home page" filename like home.asp, index.html, etc. Google's getting pretty good at getting those canonicalization issues figured out, but I'm sure it doesn't mind a little bit of help.

But this advice holds true throughout your site for a different reason than mere canonicalization. Suppose you have a site with a directory structure like Virgin Atlantic's. Here's a sample category URL for its flight search page:

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/index.jsp

Decent URL (even though I'm not a big fan of the /en/us/ quagmire) - at least it's not littered with dynamic arguments like it could be. But if I were working for that company, I'd recommend having that page resolve at the root of the final folder, instead of at index.jsp. Why? The earlier mentioned canonicalization issue is one reason. We don't want Google crawling both

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/index.jsp

and

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/

and thinking they're different pages. But Virgin Atlantic has already covered this. In fact, the latter URL mentioned above results in a 404. So for that site, canonicalization/duplication problems aren't an issue.

Here's the big reason I'd recommend that the URL resolve at /flighttimes/: Because in a year or two from now, when the company rolls over into a new platform, the filename and/or the file extension of that folder's home page will most likely change. When that happens, they'll be mired in 301 redirects from each directory's old home page to its new one - all the way across the site. That won't waste hundreds of staff hours, but it will consume a few.

Contrast that with a platform rollover from .jsp to .aspx, .net, or .cfm, or whatever, when the page resolves at the folder's root. In that case, we'd go from this url:

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/

to this one:

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/

Get it? They're the same. No lag time whatsoever. No 301s to "wait out" while they sort through their processes. No URL changes for engines makes the SEO process much smoother. Knowing how to fix SEO issues is great, but knowing how to prevent them from happening is better.

Future-Proofing Your Site by Resolving at the Folder Root
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November 1, 2006

Search Engine Friendly Pull-Down Navigation Menu

One of the issues I run across frequently is site navigation that is not easily crawled by the search engines. One of the mistakes made by developers is using pull-down menu’s that don’t include the href tags within the page html. Depending on the pull-down script, these href’s/url’s are usually hidden away in an external file and out of sight to the search engines.

It’s been my experience that sites using non-href pull-down navigation exclusively have a hard time being crawled and fully indexed.

There are options:

1. Change applications. Use a pull-down script that does include href’s within the page HTML. With today’s web development technologies, a pull down script utilizing href’s within page code may be a tough find but well worth the effort. DHTML opens up many opportunities when it comes to this issue and some further research will provide you with some options.

2. Provide alternatives. If you must use a pull-down script that excludes the href’s then try providing the search engines some crawling alternatives. Use a footer with text links to your pages, use image links or an image map. As well as any other method of posting your links in a more search engine friendly format.

3. Site map. In addition to the options listed above. Make a site map using basic href text links.

Bottom line: Don’t use a pull-down script that does not post the href tags within the page html as your only form of site navigation.

Search Engine Friendly Pull-Down Navigation Menu
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August 29, 2006

Keywords In URLs - Not Just For Search Engines

Is it just me, or are you also paying more attention to the URL listed in search engine result pages?

Let's say you're searching for a new memory stick for your child's PSP. The top two results at Yahoo have equally compelling listings, however, the URLs displayed are:

www.seospeedwagon.com/psp_memory_stick.htm

and

www.seospeedwagon.com/store/Other_W0QQsacatZ21189QQsocmdZListingItemList

Which might you be more persuaded to click on?

Boy, that first one may be just what I'm looking for eh?

Apparently the first site refers to a PSP memory stick as "psp_memory_stick" whlie the second site calls it a "Other_W0QQsacatZ21189QQsocmdZListingItemList".

I think this is a good example of how URLs displayed in search engine results pages are becoming more and more valuable as CONTENT that may affect the clickability of the entire listing.

But what about you? How are the search engines displaying your URLs? How about the URLs of your competitors? Do they qualify as keyword-relevant or as keyword-jibberish?

I'm a firm believer in keyword-enhanced, logical URL structure because:

A. There is some (no one knows exactly how much) benefit in search engine performance when keywords are included in the names of your domain and/or pages.

B. From a usability (and common sense) aspect, a URL that displays my searched keyword or similar tells me a click will likely lead me where I want to go.

Keywords In URLs - Not Just For Search Engines
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August 2, 2006

More SEO Tips for Domain Management

If you work in online marketing for a medium to large company - and you joined the company sometime after, say, 1996, here's a quick quiz: Do you know how many domains your company owns? If you're directly involved in your company's current domain strategy sessions, you might, but my guess is that you don't.

Many of our client contacts have no idea how many domains their companies own, and what's worse, frequent inquiries across their organization often lead nowhere. If you fit the profile of someone who should know more about your company's domains but doesn't, it certainly doesn't mean you're doing your job poorly. Keep in mind that securing domains for business purposes (such as copyright protection and basic phonetic variance) predates search engine optimization - not to mention search engines - by several years. The web dev mercenaries who built your site and went on a dot-com shopping spree in 1994 are long gone, and bills from the registrar come sporadically, representing a gradual increase in domain ownership.

If you're curious about whether you have multiple domains diluting your search engine presense, a fast diagnostic is to search for a specific string of text that should appear only on your site. Copy about 7-10 consecutive words from a page on your site, then search for that exact string - in quotation marks - at various engines. Traditionally, this has been a great way to find sites that steal your content. But it's also equally effective at detecting your crimes against yourself - and your SE visibility potential.

Despite a glamorous Hollywood visual metaphor, Googlebot and duplicate sites aren't a good mix.

I talked with a business owner this week who had a decent idea how many domains he owned, but he had no idea that having each one mirror his "main" site was a bad idea. Google had partially indexed about nine different domains. Yahoo knows about two. MSN knows about one. All engines show at least two variations of canonical problems, including home page (index.asp vs. root) and subdomain (www vs. non-www) duplicate indexing. This is always one of the very first things we look for when we're starting a comprehensive site evaluation, and very, very few companies have all their domains wrangled correctly, down to the last 301. So the lessons bear repreating: Give the engines what they want, but give it to them only once, or else you risk looking suspicious - even if you're old-school innocent.

(Note: Last December, I touched on a few points of search engine-friendly domain management, including wildcard subdomains and relative vs. absolute links in a nav scheme.)

More SEO Tips for Domain Management
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May 24, 2006

SEO Considerations for AJAX Development

If web development is even remotely within your periphery, you've probably heard of AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. While most serious developers realize the hype is overblown, even the most caffeine-addled code monkeys are impressed with some recent AJAX applications.

Calling AJAX "new" is a little misleading, and it's no different from calling gin & tonic poured over Cap'n Crunch a "new" breakfast treat. The ingredients have been around forever; only the unique combination is recent.

Explained simply, the key benefit of AJAX applications is their ability to work in the background to supply data to the client browser and provide a relatively seamless "application" experience instead of the click-wait, click-wait game of traditional web pages.

The "J" in AJAX (JavaScript) has been a stumbling block for developers with an eye for search-engine friendliness, but that need not be the case. While it's true that engines typically ignore scripted data, good AJAX programs can occasionally come out of their JS trances long enough to feed even the most demanding bots. Following are some notes about AJAX development as it pertains to smart SEO.

The Problem: Not Enough Unique URLs

In my opinion, the single greatest SEO issue with AJAX is the tendency (although not necessity) of AJAX applications to not judiciously create unique, bookmarkable (and therefore indexable) URLs.

I'll use Google Maps as an example, not only because it's used in this excellent AJAX backgrounder written by an IBM engineer, but because Google Maps has come to be known as the "classic" AJAX application. If you have brand awareness like Google, you don't necessarily need too many deep, internal URLs, because everyone remembers and links to "maps.google.com". But for the rest of us, getting many internal pages indexed is critical. Like the IBM article mentions, the fact that Google put the "Link to this page" feature on the Maps page shows that they understand the need for unique URLs pulled from within the application. Depending in what you're doing with AJAX, you'll derive a ton of SEO benefit from a similar philosophy.

A secondary point is that once you've created the capability to create unique internal URLs, you'll need to post them somewhere so they can be crawled. For example, suppose you had an AJAX application that enabled celebrities to build a custom automobile. After enough celebrities had built them, you'd need to build a page that links to those deep links, such as "See Tyra Banks' custom Bentley" or "Ashton Kutcher's punk'd-out Prius," for example.

You'll also need a system that can create custom, relevant titles and meta descriptions for these deep URLs, since the amount of body copy on a page likely won't be particularly plentiful or relevant.

The Other Problem: Too Many Unique URLs

Looking at the other side of the coin, you can also have usability issues by creating too many unique, indexable URLs. Microsoft's Live.com (the beta edition of its search site, which I reviewed in March) is an example. if you go to www.live.com and search for [vacation rentals], you'll get a resulting URL like

http://www.live.com/#q=vacation%20rentals&offset=1

But if you scroll through Live.com's "infinite" results long enough, the "offset" argument starts to tick upwards. Before you know it, you'll be at "offset=20" or something like that. Not necessarily a big deal, until you decide to hit the "Back" button and go to your previous site. You'll need to hit it up to 20 times to get back to that site, since each time you hit it, you merely decrement the offset argument by one. See this post by Microsoft's Robert Scoble for more on this. (Read the comments too; they're a nice contrast to the post, and a great reality check for developers.)

Other issues to consider when developing in AJAX aren't as critical to SEO as the URL issue, but they're still important. These include load time, which can be as bad as bloated Flash if you're not careful, and disabling browser controls that the user has come to rely on - never a good move.

Google Web Toolkit for AJAX Development

Google, until now one of the reasons AJAX has been approached so gingerly, has just added a new twist to the game with the introduction of the Google Web Toolkit. If nothing else, Google has always focused on the size of its index, so you can expect that any toolkit will provide a framework for unique URL generation. In its explanation of the GWT's "browser history management," the docs claim "No, AJAX applications don't need to break the browser's back button. GWT lets you make your site more usable by easily adding state to the browser's back button history."

The Class History docs provide code samples and explain how "you can create new history items (which have a token associated with them when they are created), and you can programmatically force the current history to move back or forward."

That's the necessary first step in letting your AJAX application come up for a breath of SEO. Post those links to a permanent, crawled file, and you're in the SEO-friendly AJAX web dev business.

SEO Considerations for AJAX Development
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A Reminder To Small-Medium Size Players Seeking Google Love

Early in my career, I spent several years managing a 5 physician family practice in a small Missouri town.

Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of my life happened inside the walls of that clinic. That was the day I thought I was interviewing a gal for a receptionist position when actually she was there for a pap smear. You see, my office was occupied and I had to use one of the physician exam rooms for what I thought was going to be an interview. It was her first visit to the clinic and she thought I was the doctor. Talk about mistaken identities. You should have seen the look on her face when she asked if she should sit on the exam table and I said, “No, that chair over in the corner will be just fine.�

Rural health clinics (RHCs) are formed in Missouri and other states in order to get quality health care into medically underserved rural areas. Physicians can actually get a better reimbursement rate from Medicare, Medicaid, etc. by choosing to practice in a rural setting. The official designation as an RHC comes from the Department of Health and there are rigid guidelines to achieving this determination including an exhaustive “site visit� inspection.

I remember the preparation for this inspection was excruciatingly detailed and went on for months! One of the things I remember is that all 16 of our exam rooms had to meet 3 or 4 pages of criteria … everything had to be exactly per the requirements if we were to pass the inspection and be awarded the RHC designation. I even recall someone saying that if one room didn’t contain a particular Policies & Procedures manual, the entire clinic would fail the inspection….just that one little thing!

This small piece of my past recently came to mind while talking to a client this week. This is a client that if you put their site into a large aquarium with other sites in their industry, they would be a small to medium size fish in an aquarium with lots of very small plankton, a few sharks, and one giant sperm wale.

Google was giving some “special treatment� to the sperm whale (imagine that) and our client wanted to also be considered for this Google Love. Google has made some positive comments to them, but has yet to officially consider them alongside their competitor.

Our client is smart. Before I even had a chance to ask them, they had already started to double and triple check their site, making sure all their ducks are in a nice, uniform row. They know that if Google does consider them, they need to be prepared right now.

Google isn’t as strict as the rural health clinic above, however, it’s incredibly wise to make sure your site isn’t in the black or even gray when it comes to Google’s inspection.

Just a reminder to all you small or medium size fish, check your site using Google’s “No No� list routinely -- especially if you want to be considered along with the bigger fish in your industry.

A Reminder To Small-Medium Size Players Seeking Google Love
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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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April 19, 2006

Site Changes and the Casualty of Causality

Suppose you make a slight change to your site - for example, you change the sitewide anchor text leading to your services page. A month later, you've dropped below the fold on page 1 for your "money phrase," when you used to be in the top three.

Trouble is, neither the old anchor text nor the new anchor text used that exact form of the money phrase. But it's the only thing that you've done in the last 30 days to the site, so that has to be it, right?

Unfortunately, about 95% of site owners would immediately deduce that the anchor text change was the culprit, and immediately, they'd change it back. But if that didn't work, what would you do next?

One of the downfalls of a highly metricized industry is that we expect answers. We don't necessarily mind problems, because typically, given enough variables, we can identify the problem and overcome it: A/B testing. Tweaking meta descriptions to increase clickthrough. Changing nav structure to increase index counts. And so on.

But many site owners insist on finding answers where no answers - no easy answers, anyway - exist. They insist on assigning causality to the nearest suspicious variable, and in doing so, end up cutting themselves on Occam's razor. Take the example above, where the "only" thing that has changed is the anchor text. To find other suspects beyond the "anchor text" theory and to find other possible causes of the rankings drop, let's look more closely at what else changed (or may have changed) in the preceding 30 days:

• The sites you link to have linked to new sites.
• The links pointing to your site (and all other sites) are one month older.
• Your site has added no new content.
• The site that used to sit below the fold got tired of it and did some optimization of its own.
• The domain of every site in the SERP has aged a month.
• Premium ads increased from one to two, thus pushing another organic site below the fold and altering the organic clickthough distribution.

That's just a small sample. Sometimes, the SEO who knows the most is the one who truly knows how little s/he knows, and is willing to test multiple scenarios to solve the client's problem.

Site Changes and the Casualty of Causality
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April 7, 2006

Good Content Gets Lost

I’ve been a Lost fan since it’s inception and have marveled at the overall masterful script writing. I’ve also been a 24 fan for some time and thoroughly enjoy the equally masterful writing for that show as well.

I have recently found the official podcasts for both shows and must say this is where the two shows content diverges. The Lost podcast turns out to be an extension of the wonderful creativity shown in the actual show, while the 24 podcast seems to be an afterthought. Now the cruddy podcast for 24 isn’t going to make me stop watching the show, but it has stopped me from poking around their website, seeing more ad’s etc. On the converse, the Lost podcast is so good that it leaves me searching for more.

In the Search Enging Marketing arena good content is not just good for your home or landing page, it’s good for all of your pages. It helps with SEO efforts but it also provides just plain good stuff for your sites visitors. And like the Lost podcast hopefully your inside page content can keep your site visitors searching for more instead of looking for the exit.

Good Content Gets Lost
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March 28, 2006

Top Rankings and Shania Twain

I'm not really a huge fan of country music. Although, as long as they're doing what they do best (singing), I can stomach some Dixie Chicks tunes. It's impossible for my ears not to appreciate those harmonies. And I have to come clean on temporary Garth Brooks and Randy Travis phases in my early thirties. But let's keep that between us ok?

I had a similar phase with Shania Twain, but with a twist. I haven't heard much of her early work, but I found myself really liking some of the songs on her last few studio albums.

There was something going on that sounded very familiar and surprisingly pleasing. It reminded me of something, but at first I just couldn't put my finger on it. She has a pleasant voice, but there was something else there and the more I listened, the farther away I seemed to get from the answer. It was driving me nuts.

It bothered me so much, that I listened to her last three studio albums over and over again. Slowly, I began to figure it out. I narrowed it down to the backing vocals on several of her songs. I listened to them over and over again and asked myself, who does that sound like and why do I like it so much? It took several weeks of head scratching until I finally figured it out.

I was in my car listening to my beloved '80s channel on XM radio. The Loverboy song "Lovin' Every Minute of It" came on. Let's face it, if you're mid 30s to early 40s, it's nearly impossible not to turn that one up to 10.

During the chorus, a sound that most people think is just Mike Reno's amazing voice, really sounds like about 15 Mike Renos along with his Canadian band mates all singing in a tunnel. It's a very big, layered sound that can only come from fancy knob-turning in the studio.

I immediately thought, "That's the sound! That's why I seem to like Shania Twain, but could never figure out why!"

To make a long story short, that backing vocal sound is the true genius of Shania's husband and producer Mutt Lange. Mutt penned Loverboy's first top ten hit which was, you guessed it, "Lovin' Every Minute of It." This studio technique was even more profitable for him on his work with Def Leppard, most notably on Pyromania and Hysteria. Mutt brought that sound to many of Shania's "harder" songs and many became huge hits for his spouse.

SEO Segue ... (you knew there had to be one...)

Now, when I see a top search engine placement, whether it's one our team has helped achieve for a client, or one that another "Mike The Genius" has helped achieve, I often see Mutt Lange.

Mutt is the SEO person that has worked hard perfecting his or her technique and finding his or her own SEO secret weapons. And in the end, Mutt looks up at the charts and realizes he's finally made it to #1.

Then, it's just a matter of using the secret weapons again to duplicate that success.

Top Rankings and Shania Twain
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March 10, 2006

American Idol Success

Success, according to Merriam-Webster Online dictionary, can be defined as “the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence�.
Quite often in life we see examples of success and we say to ourselves “wow, that sure would be nice to have achieved X�, and indeed it would.

I look at success as being in two different categories, short-term and long-term. Most of us would settle for any fleeting bit of success no matter how short-term it might be. The euphemism “15 minutes of fame� comes to mind as well as American Idol icon William Hung. But let me pose a question, would you rather enjoy the fruits of long-term success like Grammy award winning artist Kelly Clarkson, or the memory of short-term success?

In the SEO world there are many examples of top rankings that flamed out as quickly as they appeared. There are also an equal number of examples that just seem to always be at the top. That may be your situation. Or you may be the competitor who just can’t seem to overtake that top ranking. In either case the solution to long-term success is simple, not easy, but simple.

Lasting success is attained through diligence, perseverance, doing things the right way. It may seem sometimes that this is not the case, and there are exceptions to every rule, buy by and large the three strands of success weave themselves together to become a rope that is stronger than the sum of its parts, and will pass the test of time.

It is a long journey but don’t lose heart for the long road is what sustains the achieved success. Stated another way, in our own lives the path we take to our own success is really an investment in our own personal success. What may appear to be short-term, smaller goals, or even failures, will eventually contribute to our long-term success if we keep our perspective. Look at your SEO projects the same way and don’t fall for the “short-cut� method to success. You may rise quickly, but you will fall even quicker.

Finally, it’s nice to know that even if you’ve chosen the short path you can correct it. Your path to long-term success has just gotten longer, but you can always learn from past experiences and begin the long road to lasting success.

American Idol Success
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February 28, 2006

Bo Doesn’t Know SEO

The Three Things All Web Developers Need To Understand About Building A Web Site

If you’ve been following my blog posts, by now you can tell that I enjoy blending things in my life with how I view the SEO world. How else would a hot dog derby, an airport amnesty bin, a classic Dr. Seuss story, and a Peter Gabriel tune remind me of SEO?

This week, for my wife’s new decorating business, her graphic artist and web developer launched a beautiful web site with all its Services pages as pop-ups and all the Service description text in framesets.

If you know SEO, you likely just said, “Ouch!�

If you don’t know SEO, that sentence likely brought no reaction.

Pop-ups and frames are perhaps the two top “No No’s� in search engine friendly design. Besides pop-ups being blocked in most browsers these days, the search engine spider rarely finds them and if it does, it most often runs smack dab into a dead end. Frames still make a lot of sense as a design methodology for certain sites, but frames make it next to impossible for others to link to important content on your site. In most cases, search engines can’t see past the page where the framesets are coded.

The prime pages for optimization on her site are, you guessed it, the Services pages, therefore, the site can’t be optimized.

I had a very nice conversation with her graphic artist and web developer before the site was created. We talked about search engine friendly design and I was very comfortable with their understanding of the search engine spider hurdles and roadblocks to avoid.

Web developers and graphic artists are used to being paid based on how something looks and works. Granted, those are two very important things. We do a lot of work with Shari Thurow at Grantastic Designs because she understands there are not two, but three things that all graphic artists and web developers need to understand about building a web site:

Creativity – how the site looks
Usability – how the site functions
Visibility – how the site is seen by search engines

If you are about to dive into building a web site for your business, ask your developer about these three things and make sure each is given an equal amount of consideration in your project.

Make sure Bo really knows SEO.

Bo Doesn’t Know SEO
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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 7, 2006

Ode to a German Auto

A stable grows, but not all steeds the same
They know my new, but no one knows my used
My jockeys came to me to boldly claim
Disable JavaScript and be amused

Yet viewed through lenssen (not of rosy hue)
My stable's fate rests in the whim of Man
Depends which country code you're looking through
My doors are lock'd because of irksome ban

But when the sun sets here it calls to thee
My stallions' lovers will demand their say
And hit the track to once again run free
When new moon's passing seems like just a day

I tremble when I find myself between
Gott und Die entscheidende Suchmaschine

Ode to a German Auto
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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 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 3, 2006

How Strong is Your Keyword Torso?

As tired as I am of 2005 retrospectives and 2006 prognostications, I feel obligated to name 2006 the "Year of the Keyword Torso." Yes, I am sober.

Your industry has a "curve" of keywords. At the head of the curve are the most frequently searched-for terms. If you're in the insurance game, a few of your head terms are "insurance," "insurance quote," and "health insurance."

We often call these types of terms "trophy searches" because they're great for the ego, but in most cases, the effort in achieving them is much greater than the payoff. If you sell property and casualty insurance in West Virginia, how many of the "insurance quote" searchers are looking for your product?

At the other end of the curve is the "long tail." From a web analytics perspective, the tail gained a lot of exposure in 2005, even though people like Jill Whalen have been pushing it for years.

The tail of insurance keywords might include something like "nevada minimum collision coverage amount." Generally, people who bother to narrow a query so specifically are more likely to "act," which, depending on the industry, means make a purchase, download a file, click to read more information, and so on.

But between the ill-informed search for the head and the rough, ongoing (but worthwhile) search for the tail, don't forget the torso. (Note: Some people call it the "body" of the curve, but I consider the entire curve the "body," not just the middle section.) Torso searches are characterized by a query length somewhere between the head and tail, and by people looking for resources on a particular topic. They probably aren't ready to make a purchase today; instead, they're looking for an authoritative resource. If you satisfy their needs, they'll come back, eventually with credit card in hand.

Your industry knowledge - and your ability to communicate it - will make or break your chances for targeting the torso.

A torso term for insurance would be something like "child health insurance" or "what is whole life insurance." People searching for those phrases have no doubts that they'll be able to buy online. But for now, they probably want information and don't want a hard sell. Does your content show them what they're looking for? Do you have enough articles, fact sheets, and hard-to-find information that they will consider you a credible industry resource? If not, don't expect them to come back when they're ready to purchase.

To sum it up, success in capturing the keyword torso assumes three major things about you and your site:

1. You are creating original, helpful content regularly and often.
2. You are creating original, helpful content regularly and often.
3. You are creating original, helpful content regularly and often.

Smart bloggers have already figured this out. They're hitting the torso with their blog category pages. The number of articles in the category archive of a prolific blog is constantly fresh, constantly growing, and laser-targeted to a people with particular interests. And that, in 2006, is going to be important.

How Strong is Your Keyword Torso?
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December 8, 2005

Creating a Custom 404 Page

Creating a custom 404 page can be very helpful to your sites visitors and profitable to your company. Often times potential customers looking to purchase products from your site will simply hit the back button when confronted with a "page not found" error. Because the default error page leaves them with limited links (none to your actual site), many of those lost customers will never return.

There are many reasons why a web surfer would end up at a non-existent url on your site ranging from a site redesign to user error. Having a properly configured 404 page is crucial to retaining those visitors.

Step One: Create the custom 404 page with your editor of choice. Make sure to use your regular site HTML template complete with graphics, main navigation and footer. In the main text section insert a "Sorry" message that ask the user to please choose an option found on the page to find what they are looking for.

Step Two: Name the file 404.htm and upload to the root directory at http://www.example.com/404.htm

Step Three: Modify your .htaccess file (if none is present you can make one in Notepad) to indicate the location of your custom "page not found" error:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.example.com/404.htm

Save the modified .htaccess to your server.

--------------------------------------------------------------

From Wikipedia:

Custom error page creation using Microsoft IIS

- Use a text editor or an HTML editor to create your custom page on your server

- From your server's desktop, launch the Internet Services Manager (usually located at Start->Programs->Administrative Tools->Internet Services Manager)

- Click the [+] to the left of the server name

- Right-click on "Default Web Server" (or whatever you may have renamed it as), and click on "Properties"

- Click on the Custom Errors tab

- Click on the number of the HTTP Error you want to make the custom message for, then click "Edit Properties"

- Use the Browse button to locate the custom file you created and click OK. Keep clicking OK to dismiss the windows, then close the IIS window

Creating a Custom 404 Page
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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 30, 2005

Diagnosing Potential SEO Problems - Without Guilt

From a psychological perspective, it turns out that asking a new or potential client, "Have you ever engaged in any spammy or controversial SEO activity?" is quite a loaded question - somewhere between "Have you stopped beating your spouse?" and "Are you really going to wear that tonight?"

While we ask this question for diagnostic reasons only, it elicits immediate defense from most marketing managers. "No - of course not!" they interject, before we can even finish the question.

Too bad. I actually enjoy unthreading the spaghetti-like mess that some clients bring to us. I have fun looking at things like doorway pages, scripts that create cloaked pages, and complex link networks to see exactly how they're sculpted, and to compare the intended result of the technique versus the actual results attained. What I don't enjoy is finding out about these techniques six months into a campaign.

So recently, I recognized the error of our ways when we discovered a client, who had previously promised that all was on the level, had several additional domains, all on the same IP block, using a meta refresh to point to the main site. This was the likely cause of rejection from a few human-edited directories.

So why was it our error? To the client, it was on the level. Long ago, they had purchased domains that they either intended on using, or that they didn't want their competition to buy, and they simply pointed them to the main domain the only way they knew how. Fast-forward to the last few years, when the specific technique you use in redirection is a critical component of SEO strategy.

So now I phrase it differently. "Tell me about your site's history," I say. "What have you done in the past, and how did it work?" It's a little bit clinical and sterile, but we end up finding out much more helpful information.

As a post-script, to phrase it in terms free of the slightest hint of judgment, here are some site activities that, while we're sure they were done with ONLY THE BEST OF INTENTIONS, might cause you some eventual grief in the indexing and ranking processes:

• Exchanging links with a site or group of sites whose sole criterion for offering a link is verifying your willingness to offer a link in return.
• 5000 (or any-thousand) doorway pages with 75% keyword density that redirect to your normal site.
• Any activity whose description was punctuated with, "Don't worry, no human will ever see this anyway."

(Humans, we keep finding, are one of the most annoying factors in web usability.)

Diagnosing Potential SEO Problems - Without Guilt
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November 22, 2005

SEO Mailbag: Meta Tagging - Dead or Alive?

I regularly check the Speedwagon keyword reports to see exactly how people first come across our sleek, cast-iron chassis. I contrast their query text with their landing page, and if their query is vague, I try to intuit their intent. Did they find what they wanted when they arrived?

A lot of people are still concerned with the state of meta tags in SEO. Here are some referring query strings we've seen in the past few days:

• meta tags dead
  
• meta tags are dead
  
• are meta tags dead 2005 - (Hang on - I think the 2006 decision will be announced soon.)
  

When most people talk about meta tags and SEO, they're usually talking about the keywords and description tags.

• meta name="keywords" - the punching bag of choice for SEOs. While it's true that most engines completely avoid the keywords data in pages, I still add a modest set of keywords in this tag. It's not going to hurt you, it takes about 15 seconds, and some clients' site-search programs utilize the data in this tag. John goes so far as to wax poetic about our love/hate relationship with it.
  
• meta name="description" - While engines may not use the description in ranking a page, the description is often used at Google, Yahoo, and MSN as the descriptive (get it?) text on their SERPs. Following is a shot of a Google SERP for the query [firefox tricks]. The descriptive text below the title is pulled from the meta description:

Other meta tags do exist, however. In fact, by their design, meta tags are a user-defined system of data encapsulation, so there's really no bona fide standard list. (In fact, check out my favorite WHOIS engine's use of meta tagging. Hint: search the source code for "jedi".)

• meta name="robots" - This can be useful if you know what you're doing. Depending on the attributes you use, you can control the bots' indexing of the page, whether they follow links on the page, and whether their indexes retain a cached copy of the page. But if you don't have any robots tags, don't worry: By default, if robots don't see a robots tag, they're supposed to index the page and follow its links.
• meta name="revisit-after" - This is a long-running joke. It's a legitimate attribute - if you're targeting an obscure Canadian engine - but for everyone else, its presence marks you as a novice. Somewhere along the way, people spread the word that you could control robot crawl cycles using this tag. You can't.
• meta http-equiv="content-language" - Well, sure. You need this - it specifies the primary language of your page. But nearly every web dev system I've ever seen (okay, not Notepad, penny-pinchers) takes care of this one.

I could go on, and someday, I might. The point is to not get caught up in generalizations like "meta tags are dead," because your fresh-faced web dev crew might interpret that as "delete everything in the header tags." And that would be a shame.

SEO Mailbag: Meta Tagging - Dead or Alive?
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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 15, 2005

An SEO Checklist for Site Redesign

When you're about to unleash a site redesign, your to-do list probably appears endless. And once you've taken care of the design itself and the graphics, page files, and remaining assets are accounted for and tested, you still have to consider SEO.

A more comprehensive SEO checklist for site redesign surely exists somewhere, but my goal is to show things that site owners typically overlook and that, when added up, can have significant impact on a site's performance over time. Note: When I refer to "redesign" in this context, I'm not talking about changing domains. Instead, I'm referring to changing the entire file, folder, and page structure of the existing site, and perhaps (but not necessarily) a migration to a new code type, such as going from PHP to ASP (or back).

• Account for your top URLs. Analyze the last few months of web stats and determine your highest performing pages, both in terms of entry pages and strict page views. Brochure-type sites will have a smaller number than database-driven sites. Determine whether these top pages will have counterparts on the new site. If so, map the old pages to the new ones using a 301 (permanent) redirect. (James discusses 301 redirects here.)

  As for your non-performers, that's a judgment call. Even if certain pages don't get too many views or don't have new-site counterparts, you need to account for them when you roll over and make sure that if users land on them, they end up somewhere relevant. You can map those remaining pages to the home page (again, using a 301), or, you can avoid a lot of work and let a custom 404 page handle it (see below). Using a 301 will transfer lots of little fragmented bits of link pop and PR to the root, but a well built custom 404 page will likely be more help to your users and save them a click or two in getting to their final destination.

  Along these lines, do a thorough backlink check to see who's linking deep into your site. (Yahoo Site Explorer is currently one of my favorite backlink checkers.) Even if these links don't send much traffic, chances are the traffic is pretty qualified, so you should take special care of the visitors that come from reputable industry sites and make sure that the page they land on isn't a black hole.

  I often read articles that recommend you contact everyone linking to you and request that they update their links. In my experience, this hasn't been necessary. When a 301 is properly implemented from old_page.htm to new_page.asp, I've always seen links to old_page.htm eventually show up in a backlink check of new_page.asp.

• Prepare your custom 404 page. A custom 404 page is like a trapeze artist's safety net. Even if a user calls for a page that doesn't exist, she'll still end up on your site instead of seeing the ugly (and near-useless) default 404 page. A well made 404 page is often a variation of the site map, along with an introductory note that apologizes for the lost page, and an earnest hope that the user will find what she needs by following one of the links on the page. Most important, make sure that the links on your 404 page correspond to your new site content, not the old content. Otherwise, your users might just end up swallowing themselves in an endless 404 loop. (One more thing: If you're on a Microsoft platform, make sure that your 404 pages give a true 404 error code.)

• Update your robots.txt file. Many people forget to update their robots.txt exclusions when their folder structures change. If your private data, images, or testing area has changed locations, make sure to add a line in the file to account for it. Now this is important, and it needs emphasis: Don't replace old exclusions with new ones. Instead, add new exclusions and retain old ones. From the engines' perspectives, those old folder structures will still be around for a while, so if you delete old exclusions, you could see some funky things happen for several months.

• Update your analytics and conversion definitions. Here's another item that often goes overlooked until the monthly reports come out. If your analytical conversions are based on views of certain pages, specific click paths, or hits on certain files from the old site, make sure to update your conversion definitions to account for the new site. You don't need the accounting mess created when the revenue and the analytics program disagree about conversions and ROI.

• Remember your outgoing links. When everything else is done and you have time for a bit of altruism, remember that your outgoing links are likely benefiting someone else - either another site you own or a site you have recommended. Any old articles or resource pages that link to those sites will no longer benefit them if they're deleted. So if you still think those sites are worthy of your link, make sure to recreate them somehow.
  

I hope this list brings up some issues you hadn't thought of. If you have other ideas, drop a note in the comments and I'll post them later on.

An SEO Checklist for Site Redesign
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November 11, 2005

More On Content Management Systems (CMS) and SEO

Last week in my post, I recommended some questions to ask your potential CMS vendor before adding a CMS to your site.

This week, I spoke with a company who explained how their CMS forces them to have identical HTML title tags and page content titles. This will definitely lessen the flexibility needed to optimize your title tags and for your more competitive keyword phrases, you need all the SEO flexibility you can get. So, I'm adding this to my list of questions which now are:

1. How can I change my title tags and meta tags (code)?
2. What will my URLs look like?
3. Can I have unique title tags and page content titles?

I also had the opportunity to sit in on a training session with a client who is making a change to a new CMS that uses a Base-10 platform. I haven't had a chance to really dig into it yet, but all three of my questions were answered positively and published pages were search-engine-friendly and optimized.

I'll report soon about more findings as we get our "hands dirty" with this new CMS. But, so far so good. Stay tuned.

More On Content Management Systems (CMS) and SEO
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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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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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September 23, 2005

Web Site Redesign: Avoiding A Category 5 Storm

A major redesign of your web site can hit your search engine rankings, traffic, and conversions like a category 5 hurricane. However, there are some critical things you can do to cool the waters and downgrade your redesign to a tropical storm.

Keep in mind that if your URLs are going to change, this will affect your search rankings, traffic, and conversions. But, if you take proper precautions both before and after your redesigned site launches, you'll weather the storm just fine.

Here are some important things to consider and do:

Keep The Faucet On
Make sure your design team creates a new custom 404 page. This will ensure you capture visitors who arrive from old page links at the engines instead of them getting a "Page Not Found". We recommend the 404 page be a sitemap so the visitor can choose exactly where they'd like to go. See our custom 404 page as an example.

Tell The Engines Where To Go
Remember that your old URLs are likely in the search engine's index. If these URLs change with your redesign, you have to tell the search engines where to find the new URLs. The best way to direct a search engine to a new page is with a 301 permanent redirect. If you want more details on how to do this, see James' post "Implementing a 301 Server-Side Redirect"

Don't Forget The SEO
Make sure your design team doesn't leave the SEO behind when they create new pages. Be sure that the optimization code and text content is not overlooked or stripped out when your new URLs are created.

Get Indexed
During the first few months after the redesigned site goes live, be sure to closely monitor Google, MSN, and Yahoo! to make sure the new pages get indexed correctly. If new pages are not indexed within the first few weeks, some manual search engine submissions may be needed.

Don't Forget Other Inbound Links
Take a close look at how other web sites link to you. If the pages they link to have new URLs, make sure to notify them so these links can be updated.

Web Site Redesign: Avoiding A Category 5 Storm
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