SEO Tips & Tricks

June 23, 2009

A Corporate Blogger's Starter Guide

A few week's back, Lisa Barone penned a post on Outspoken Media, seductively titled Why I Hate Bloggers. She makes a point most can relate to: there are more blogs that you don't read than those you do read. It's funny hearing the message come from a renowned blogger -- an entertaining, educational, well-respected one, at that -- but we all know where she's coming from.

Photo by sa'xic via Creative Commons

The advent of blogging has brought on a pretty significant shift in the way people communicate and, with its growing popularity, has attracted all kinds to the blogging arena. As expected, some blog content is more appreciated by a general readership than other blog content. But from personal experience, I believe that almost every would-be blogger has thoughts and ideas worth sharing. Likewise, many businesses would benefit by communicating important news and events through an informal medium that invites engagement, like a blog. The key is figuring out how to communicate in a way an audience will embrace.

Over the years, Bruce Clay, Inc. bloggers have written pretty extensively about corporate blogging here on the BC blog. In fact, today I was messing around with some of the categories used on the blog and I realized there's a veritable treasure trove of corporate blogging resources hidden within the archives. It's about time some of those posts saw the light of day again, so I've rounded some of them up to bring you a fast-and-sweet starter guide for corporate blogging.

Why Blog?

Corporate Blogging Isn't About the Media: Who says traditional companies shouldn't have blogs? To the contrary, Lisa explains that if a company doesn't know how to share their message through online media, they might as well quit already. A company should blog, not for media attention, but rather, to engage customers: "The sooner you realize that your corporate blog isn't about you or your company or the media and that it's about your audience, the greater your blogger experience is going to be." Traditional companies that are afraid of entering the blogosphere should realize that the Web isn't going anywhere any time soon and that opportunities online abound.

The State of Blogging

A Report on Blogging: Last September, Technorati published a series that analyzed trends and themes of blogging and surveyed the effect of blogging and blogs. There are almost a million new posts published every day, proving that the medium has gone mainstream. Already, new channels are springing up to be the next big thing and blogging is a widely-accepted and relatively-understood communication medium. Blogging has proven profitable for some, and the medium continues to evolve.

Finding Content Ideas

Don't Be Popular. Be Useful.: It's often tempting to pay attention to metrics that illustrate the popularity of blog posts through stats like retweets or page views. But focusing solely on visibility can get you to take your eye off the prize -- providing something valuable and useful to readers. Of course you want to author a must-read blog, but you'll achieve that by giving readers something unique or previously unknown.

Finding Your Blogger Voice

Can You Be A Corporate Blogger Without Losing Yourself?: Any corporate blogger may eventually face a time when his or her opinion conflicts with the organization's stance. It can be a challenge to keep a balance between supporting the company and maintaining personal authenticity. But organizations that completely marginalize dissenting opinions are in danger of losing their audience's trust. There's little harm in mentioning different view points because it makes the organization look open to diversity and even gives the company a chance to argue their opinion as well. In the end, it helps when the blogger and the company hold many of the same values and goals.

Using Blogging for Reputation Management

Using Your Blog To Keep Fires on Your Own Site: No matter how hard you try to avoid it, some disgruntled customer is going to flame your company online. Understandably, online reputation management is a growing industry, as well as a growing priority for many businesses. A blog is a convenient tool that can help companies stay informed of and contribute to conversations. A blog is a great place to announce possible concerns, new procedures and technical difficulties, among other reputation nightmares. By addressing your audience up front, you can gain trust and maintain some measure of control in the discussion.

Tips for Liveblogging

A Guide for Liveblogging a Search Conference: A veteran liveblogger, Lisa shares her tips for the real-time, on-the-road blogging style known as liveblogging. Don't forget to bring your hardware, plan your topics ahead of time, claim a good spot near a power outlet, turn on your best focusing power, and don't drive yourself too crazy with editing.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/23/09 at 5:29 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Blogging, New Media, Reputation Management, SEO Tips & Tricks

June 15, 2009

Audio of Matt Cutts's Nofollow Comments in Today's SEO Newsletter

It's the 15th of the month and we just published the latest edition of the SEO Newsletter. Subscribers can expect to find the fresh new newsletter in their inboxes tomorrow, and the Web version is available now. Here's a quick preview of the exciting stories you'll find.

This month's Back to Basics article offers up seven tips on SEO for nonprofit organizations. While basic optimization strategy is the same for both nonprofit and for-profit sites, there are some additional opportunities available to nonprofit organizations. Included in the article is info on Google Grants, the YouTube Nonprofit Program and how to get your hands on free accounts and software.

Meanwhile, the Feature article should help eliminate some of the confusion over what Matt Cutts said at SMX Advanced regarding nofollow-based PageRank sculpting. Throughout the article there are embedded clips from the SMX Advanced You&A with Matt Cutts. Questions about Matt's exact words and intent are addressed with direct quotes from Matt and expert analysis from Bruce. Care for a taste?

Question: Matt, previously you seemed to support PageRank sculpting and it seems to me that is not something that you're supporting or not going to use anymore. Why is that, and is that going to be considered a negative indicator?

Matt Cutts: No, definitely not. Don't think about it like... It's your site. However you want to do the links within your site, you're welcome to do. What I'm trying to communicate, and what Maile and Nathan and a lot of people have been communicating -- in fact, if you look at the nofollow page that we've put up on our webmaster help documentation, we say, you can use it to eliminate links to sign-in pages and things like that, but it's a far better use of your time to have information architecture, or a site architecture, that makes it so that the pages that you want to have PageRank, the pages you want to be crawled, are fairly close in terms of number of links from, say, the root of your site.

From this quote we can gather that:

• The behavior of the nofollow attribute has changed, and Matt later says "the behavior could change in the future."
• Nofollow-based PageRank sculpting is not the most efficient use of an SEO's time.
• The nofollow link element is not a negative indicator for Google.
• The nofollow link element can be used to cut off PageRank flow to pages you don't want to rank.
• The best kind of PageRank management occurs when a site's architecture directs PageRank to intended pages.

The full article includes four more clips of Matt during the You&A. It also includes Bruce's recommendations for the selective use of nofollow, as well as info on a site architecture solution that manages the flow of PageRank. It's called siloing. Maybe you've heard of it?

All kidding aside, there's still time to sign up for the email version of the newsletter before it hits inboxes Tuesday. The newsletter sign-up form is in the right rail on this very page. Or, just click through to the SEO Newsletter from the links in this post. Either way, we think you'll be glad you did.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/15/09 at 4:44 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Google, Linking Strategy, SEM Industry, SEO Tips & Tricks

May 14, 2009

Jumping into the Real Estate Fray, Part 2

It's day three of real estate week here on the Bruce Clay blog. We don't typically focus on a single industry in our coverage of all-things-SEO, but the current controversy over whether Google should be allowed to "scrape" listing information from IDX Web pages is a golden opportunity. It's timely, too, because this week thousands of real estate industry leaders have converged on Washington for the annual Midyear Legislative Meetings. Before I take the real estate industry as a case study and prescribe some SEO/SEM medicine to cure their ills, there's an update to the story!

Breaking News from Washington, D.C.

The announcement broke just hours ago, and Twitter was buzzing about it. It looks like NAR has seen the light! They've decided to change their IDX policy, which is used as the model for MLSs nationwide. Here's the news in a nutshell:

This means that NAR no longer considers Google a scraper! Another Twitter reporter snapped a photo of the policy change as it was announced:

In case you can't see it clearly, the revised policy reads: Participants must protect IDX information from unauthorized use. This requirement does not prohibit indexing of IDX sites by search engines.

So NAR sees the difference between unauthorized site scrapers and search engines. Hallelujah! This is a happy day for real estate professionals, who know they have been losing the Web marketing battle for years.

What Real Estate Professionals Should Do Next

Don't spend a minute wondering whether you should back out of the IDX data share. It's time to put that old fearful thinking behind and go full-steam ahead into Web marketing. Redefine yourself as a service provider and let go of the role of information hoarder. That self-image should be left crumbling in your trunk with the last edition of the old MLS book.

Instead, instruct your webmaster to allow your IDX pages to be indexed as soon as you hear the all-clear from your local MLS. And consider creating static pages with listing information in addition to your framed IDX searches and displays. You want to give the search engine spiders lots of indexable content to chew on!

And read on for more advice as I use the real estate professional as a case study for applying Web marketing and SEO.

SEO to the (Real Estate Industry's) Rescue!

Perhaps NAR's change of heart was the result of an "ah ha!" moment. Maybe, just maybe, they realized that by allowing REALTORS®'s sites to be better indexed, the industry might be able to claim more search engine real estate (pun totally intended). One can always hope.

Most real estate professionals understand that they desperately need to improve their online presence. But how? Despite the fact that most for-sale property information online originates with their listings, third-party Web sites get the credit. Run a Google search for real estate for any local area and you'll find at most one or two broker sites ranking on the first page of the SERPs. Primarily you find third-party real estate search sites, like Trulia.com, Homes.com, Zillow.com, Movoto.com, Yahoo! Real Estate, and the industry flagship Realtor.com. Many of these sites do direct traffic back to the listing broker's Web site if people click to "view more details," but not all. And there's no reason why a successful local broker's Web site should not come to the top when it's their neighborhood's real estate that's wanted! After all, they ARE the experts.

#1: Befriend the search engines. If you don't already, understand that Google is not your competitor, but your ally. When people search for a property in your area, you want them to find your Web site, right? Do a good job of letting Google know what you're all about. Put plenty of original text content on your site using keywords like "real estate," "homes for sale," "My Town Name" and lots of local area references, and that can happen.

#2: Submit your listings to Google. Brokers should be proactive andsubmit your listings to Google directly. You should be the one to get the information out there first. Consider submitting to the other search engines, as well. Yahoo! charges a hefty fee for this ($49.95 per listing), so check to see if your brokerage firm lets you do this on their dime.

#3: Don't hide your listing information. Many brokers hide listing information behind a form like this one:

Look at all those fields! Now I don't know how many people searching for home information actually take the time to fill out a form like that. Maybe it's working for some brokers, and they're really getting prospects this way. But what I do know is that search engines can't get past these forms. They'll act like a roadblock to search engine spiders, and your listing information won't be indexed. They may also be diverting users away -- after all, why fill out a form when so much listing information is easily available through the third-party sites?

#4: Build links to your site. I checked a bunch of broker sites' link counts. (You can do this using our handy free SEMToolBar, or by doing link: searches in Yahoo!) Not surprisingly, they had almost no inbound links. Seriously, the most I found was "3" links, and those were internal! If real estate is essentially a local business that builds credibility by networking within their communities, why isn't that network being reflected on the Web? As any SEO can tell you, without links to help establish your authority on a subject, you don't have a very good chance of showing up on the front page of Google.

One more point about building links is that not only do search engines quantify the links to your site, they also follow them. So if you're sure that for usability reasons you want to keep that roadblocking contact information form I mentioned before in place on your site, you can at least LINK to static pages all about your featured properties and other information. Spiders can then index those pages by following the links.

#5: Make your Web site unique. Many real estate professionals, knowing that they "had to have a Web site," took the easy route and set up a prefab template supplied by their brokerage firm or some third-party company. It's next to impossible to get indexed by the search engines if all your site offers is duplicate content, because it's the search engine's job to filter out duplicates and present searchers with the original, best, most authoritative version. And guess what -- that isn't going to be the cookie-cutter site. I loved the comment left by Foot In Mouth on our blog yesterday about this:

"I think real estate agents who just get a template based site and do nothing with it have a very expensive business card."

If you want your site to be found in the SERPs, you're going to need to make it different. Write about your local schools, neighborhoods, hang-out places, and your favorite frozen yogurt shop. Talk about new housing developments underway, changes in the rental market, and so forth. Give your site lots of locally specific information for the search engines to index. Then the next time Mr. and Mrs. Homebuyer go to Google and search for homes for sale in your area, your Web site might just be the first one that pops up.

Posted by Paula Allen on 05/14/09 at 2:15 PM | Comments (9)
See more entries in Copywriting / Content, Google, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Integration, Yahoo

May 13, 2009

Jumping into the Real Estate Fray, Part 1

Photo by BlackHawkTraffic via Creative Commons

I'm feeling game today. Not having a snake pit to jump into or a wild animal to tame, I thought I'd venture onto the blog and dive right into the center of one of the messiest, most controversial issues confronting the real estate industry today. Why? Because it relates to SEO. And because it sounds like fun.

Real Estate Lessons to Learn

Virginia broached the dilemma facing real estate professionals in their search marketing presence yesterday. It deserves a closer look, because there are facets of this discussion that can be applied to every industry. Issues like content ownership rights and ranking for your own content may be red hot in real estate, but they have global application. So let's take a closer look at the problem, and tomorrow I'll outline a Web marketing solution.

Waving the Wrong Flag

We should be careful choosing a side to cheer for in the case of the multiple listing service that called Google a scraper and told some of its members to stop allowing certain MLS listings to be indexed. The broker whose Web site received the cease and desist order, Paula Henry, wants to make the issue about embracing technology and giving the public free access to information. She's raising the free-access flag that all of us love to rally behind. Her case paints NAR as old-school and against progress, and describes the local MLS as "an 800 pound gorilla" out to stomp on her rights. It's easy to give this a surface read and jump on her bandwagon. After all, we in the SEO industry are on the cutting edge of progress. We support technology. We're in favor of public access to information, and the more that can be indexed, the better!

But that's not what it's really about. This case is about Web content ownership, duplicate content, and who gets to rank for what in the search engines.

MLSs Are Not the Bad Guys

Multiple listing services do not stop Google from indexing property listings. They can control which information fields should be public-viewable (the banned list is usually short, things like agent-only remarks and showing instructions), but they actually encourage the online distribution of listings. Search engines cannot spider the MLS system directly because it's behind a login. However, selling brokers can and do advertise their listings on the Internet. Besides putting the information on their own Web sites, brokers can send it directly to public Internet sites such as Realtor.com, Google, Yahoo!, etc. Homeowners nowadays expect this extra online marketing, and many MLSs have even required their software vendors to provide easy ways to send new listings to these third-party sites automatically. I know, because I helped fulfill those requests while working for a leading MLS system vendor before coming to Bruce Clay.

Is Content Really Yours?

Paula Henry's indexed pages in question, however, were IDX listings that didn't belong to her. IDX is a different sort of thing. It enables showing other brokers' listings on your Web site.

A listing is like original content, researched and entered by the selling broker. Imagine you create a Web site with beautiful, original text. When someone comes and copies it, which always happens, you're rightfully miffed. If that person's Web site starts outranking yours for your content, though, you're justifiably angry. Won't you complain to Google and everyone else you know to try to get the index corrected? Or will you just roll over and surrender to the inevitableness of duplicate content?

When Broker Joe sends his own listings to Google, the search engine links back to Joe's Web site. That's perfect, no problem. However, if competing sites show Joe's listing information after receiving it through IDX and get indexed for it, it's Joe's loss, as least as far as his search engine marketing efforts go.

In the Web marketing world we know that it is often futile to fight for your rights when faced with content ownership issues. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight. Similarly, it is probably futile for real estate brokers to continue to demand ownership rights to listings and try to block other sites from being indexed for them.

Photo by Aaron G Stock via Creative Commons

I can't help wanting to root for their right to try. However, in the course of writing this article I've come to realize that blocking access just won't work.

So What's the Solution?

Real estate agents need to stop worrying about what to block, and focus on what to allow, instead. In tomorrow's post, I'll recommend some search engine optimization principles that the real estate industry needs to know and apply. Bickering in committee meetings over what Internet content to block isn't going to solve the real estate industry's dilemma. They need strong Web marketing and SEO medicine now in order to survive.

Posted by Paula Allen on 05/13/09 at 4:04 PM | Comments (7)
See more entries in Copywriting / Content, Google, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Integration, Yahoo

May 7, 2009

Protecting Your Site from Content Theft

Like a wise and savvy webmaster, Bruce monitors the company's Web site content religiously. Someone has to. Despite being copyrighted property, our content pops up around the Web faster than fungus. Scraped and copied content is a scourge of the Internet and happens to everyone, but that doesn't make it less annoying.

Content development requires time, money and talent -- three things that usually come in short supply. But once you've published the content to the Web, anyone can come by and steal it with unprecedented ease. It's important that website owners take the initiative to defend their site content by copyrighting the content and monitoring any duplication. Lisa Barone wrote a short and sweet guide to copyrighting your content, which you should definitely read if you haven't you haven't yet earned the little "c" next to your name.

But what if your content is copyrighted and people are still playing unfair? Then what?

Susan and Bruce wrote a helpful chapter about this predicament in the Content Creation book of Search Engine Optimization All-In-One For Dummies. I thought I'd sum it up for our benefit here. Or maybe I should just copy it... Kidding!

These recommendations are in no particular order and we suggest you decide how to proceed based on your unique situation.

Ask the Site to Take the Content Down

The first thing a nice person like yourself should do is to kindly request that the content be removed from the site. With copyright protected content, it's your job to police your property. And even though they may have been sneaky and rude, you don't have to play their nasty game. Turns out, a lot of people will respond to request letters like this, but just in case they dispute ownership it's a smart idea to include notice of copyright on all pages of your site. If content is scraped, the copyright may be swiped up and reproduced with it. This makes it very easy to identify who the true, original owner is.

We recently found our content copied by a supposed Web design and SEO company. They hadn't included our copyright notice, but they did manage to give us an inadvertent plug by explaining how the Bruce Clay, Inc. site offers SEO info and help. By mentioning the company or Web site name in the body copy, you increase the chances of finding the content when it has been stolen.

Ask the Search Engines to Remove the Content from the Index

Search engines hate scraped content almost as much as rightful owners do. Not only does it clutter up the index, but it requires the engine to find the original, authoritative source. The search engines have provided webmasters with a way to report scraped content and will possibly remove the naughty pages from their index. As explained in Lisa's post on copyright protection, this process is based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Google, Yahoo and Live Search have all made DMCA reporting available.

Ask the ISP to Shut the Site Down

Alternately or additionally, you may try to get the site taken down through a more direct source. Look up the site's Whois information and you can find the registered owner and the host server, or ISP. It's probably safe to assume that an Internet Service Provider has a lot to lose if found to be assisting theft, which is essentially what content scraping is. Chances are, the ISP will err on the safe, non-litigious side of the situation rather than waiting for the offending site to right their wrong.

File a Report with the Police

Being that copied content is theft, it's possible that the police might have some jurisdiction in the matter. Of course, you'll want to have proof before you walk into the station claiming such serious allegations, and a witness doesn't hurt either. Years ago, Bruce had watched his content show up so many places that he began expecting to see it in bathroom stalls. He was fed up and decided to do something about it, so he called the police. They said they would be happy to help if the content was officially copyrighted. At the time, it wasn't. You can bet that changed fast.

Send a Cease and Desist Letter and Litigation

Something that will usually shake things up is a cease and desist order. Drafted by a lawyer, a C & D threatens legal consequences if they fail to comply with the request. Things begin to get costly when lawyers get involved, but if you plan to file a lawsuit if your requests are not heeded, a C & D is an important first step. Filing a lawsuit may make sense if material damage has been done to your business. As with filing a police report, legal options require that you show lots of proof in order to be successful. The Associated Press recently served a cease and desist to bloggers and sites copying their content. However, the AP's aggressive tactics have been frowned upon by most of the blogosphere, so be sure you're not overzealous in your content policing.

Rewrite the Content

Rather than trying to control a third party, it may be easier to rewrite the stolen content. With new content you will eliminate any filtering your site receives due to duplicate content. However, content development is costly and time consuming, so don't be fooled by the perception that writing new content is the most cost-efficient solution. If you choose this solution, you risk losing your rankings for the optimized content -- rankings you worked hard to obtain -- but you will have the most control over your site in the end.

That is, until the next scraper stops by to say hello.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 05/ 7/09 at 5:33 PM | Comments (11)
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engines

March 25, 2009

Small Voices, Big Impact: Social Media for the Little Guy

Good morning and welcome to day two of SES New York. Forget the pleasantries; I skipped coffee this morning after an argument with my alarm clock. And Kim Krause Berg of cre8pc and Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media are both blogging this one as well. I see Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR and Mike McDonald of Web Pro News up front as well. I should probably skip over to another session to avoid this battle of the bloggers. Instead I'm just going to make this good.

The moderator is Stoney deGeyter, president of Pole Position Marketing. Our speakers are Amber Naslund, director of community at Radian6; Jennifer Evans Laycock, director of social media at SiteLogic; Christina Kerley, marketing specialist at ckEpiphany; and Tim Kendall, director of monetization at Facebook.

It's going to be mostly Q&A but Jennifer Laycock is going to start off with an overview.

Social media marketing is the name but it's really about conversations. You have to get in conversations with your customers so you can improve your business.

Social media is the bleeding edge of marketing -- they call it that because it hurts. Technologies pop up and clones come along, there's always the next big thing. Social media existed before Facebook and Twitter. It's anything online that lets people connect with one another.

It's not about finding the next big thing. Look for what has already taken hold and go there. This is how you get the biggest audience. Focus your efforts on the established areas. The people at the frontlines are also marketers -- not the people you're trying to reach.

She shows an XKCD comic of the map of online communities.

Consumers Hunt for Info --> Social Media Conversations <-- Marketers Hunting for Consumers

Social Media Launch Point: Flickr

This platform is largely ignored by marketers. But images are very powerful. The people on Flickr are very engaged because they're already taking the time to post their pictures. There is conversation taking place about products and businesses.

Flickr can also be a tool on the links front. You won't get link juice but you can get engaged traffic. You can post pics with links in the description. If you have anything that's visual about your products or services, do some research and see if that's somewhere you can be. [More on the value of Flickr for link building from Lisa's great article for Search Engine Land.]

Why you love it: Flickr is affordable -- $25/year for a pro account -- and it's easy to access.

Social Media Launch Point: Twitter

She describes Twitter as a giant wall covered in post-it notes. You could read a huge amount of conversation, but you want to narrow it down to what is important to you. There are also messages about you. Twitter search makes it possible to narrow down the conversations.

The power of the retweet is that things you say get shared to more networks than just your own. This is what makes Twitter great for news and viral sharing. You can also ask for feedback quickly.

Why you love it: You can use it anywhere and it's easy to get started.

Social Media Launch Point: YouTube

YouTube is being ignored in favor of sexier, newer mediums, but it's really only second in search market share to Google. You can optimize YouTube content the same way as content on your site. The Will It Blend campaign from Blendtec is a great example of using YouTube for marketing right. It's catchy and an entertaining and it also proves the value of the product. The first five videos cost roughly $100. These videos got covered by the Today Show, Newsweek and the NY Times. Their online sales quadrupled. Greg Jarboe pops in to say Blendtec saw a 700 percent increase in online sales (as a result of the campaign).

Why you love it: You can organize, customize and utilize YouTube videos.

Social Media Launch Point: Networks

LinkedIn is often overlooked because people don't know how to use it. One of the big benefits is figuring out how you're connected to someone. If you're looking to connect with someone, find out who you know also knows them.

The Value Triangle

Blogs and articles (the top is the widest point)
Social reviews
Discussion forums
Search results
Social news
Microblogging (the bottom is the narrowest point)

More context is at the top and more competition for attention is at the bottom. Figure out where you'll get the most bang for your buck.

Q&A

How has marketing changed?

Christina: Overall, think of where you before you purchase something. We're looking for our information from other customers rather than salespeople. That's the biggest thing that's changed. The other thing that's changed is how the marketing message is delivered. Now it's back and forth rather than just one way.

Amber: The pace and volume is what's overwhelming to marketers today. You have to be incredibly targeted and focused in talking to the people you want to talk to.

Jennifer: It hasn't changed as much as it's taken us back to a long time ago. 100 years ago you'd go to the same vendor for your meat and they'd know what cut of meat you like and even save it for you. Then the big box retailers came on the scene and you weren't known personally. Now consumers have the option to choose who they want to purchase from -- anywhere around the world.

Christina: The tools have broken down the boundaries and extend your reach. You can give a small business type customer service even though you're a big business.

How do you pull yourself away from traditional marketing? Social media takes a log of opportunity cost but traditional media costs a lot up front but you don't have to manage it.

Amber: She works for a small software startup that started in 2006. She says that the company has spent less than $2000 on traditional media. They knew that the opportunity cost was high but by building organically over time, the customers are intensely loyal and those who aren't customers are fans because of the community building, engendering good will even though they've never done business with them.

What if your audience skews older and isn't really involved with social media?

Christina: There's a misunderstanding that only the young are on social networking sites. There are more seniors that are joining online communities. For those that aren't, it's a great opportunity to introduce them to the new online tools. It has to be done in simple ways, which will make marketers better communicators.

Jennifer: We forget sometimes about all the things that count as social media. Blogs are clicked on through search engine results. Product reviews are filled out on Amazon. People are doing those things and reporting that they don't take part in social media.

Amber: The reason it's important to investigate is to find whether or not social media is right for your business. It's not right for every business but you have to find out.

Christina: If nothing else, use social media for research. You don't have to write a blog but you do have to listen. You'd be amazed at what you can find out for free.

What are the top ways that Facebook is being monetized? What do you see small business taking advantage of?

Tim: FB is primarily getting money through advertising. They have two types of offerings. The brand offering is an engagement ad that shows up on the right side. They also have a self-service PPC offering. You can target your ad very granularly. The primary tool they see people using are Facebook pages. There are seeing a lot of businesses getting good distribution through the presence of a Facebook page and people can choose to affiliate themselves with you.

What is keeping business from jumping into social media?

Christina: Businesses are mostly afraid of people that will speak negatively about the product or service. But they'll be giving you your feedback freely. 99 percent of the time it works out really well.

Amber: Social media didn't create criticism. It's just easier to hear it. Her company is big on listening and engagement because they recognize that when someone is complaining about you, they just want someone to listen. You can help them and are given an opportunity to fix their situation. It's an opportunity to respond in a way that's never been available.

How can reach out to people within a radius of your location?

Christina: On Twitter you can target you geography. On Facebook you can as well. Use the tools to filter the information to geo-specific conversations.

We're going to see another presentation now, this time by Tim Kendall.

Building your customer base with Facebook

How do you create a presence? Build a profile. You can customize depending on what type of customers are coming. People who are already fans will see a wall with the latest information. For people coming for the first time, you can default to a different tab and put out a flashy message.

There's an ability to share photos, video and other multimedia content. That shows up on the wall and is published in front of all the people following you on Facebook. Another cool thing you get is insights into who's on your page. Page views, uniques, fans, gender and age are all broken down, among other things. You can tailor your marketing campaigns based on these insights.

The most important thing to remember about these pages is that they can be powerful distribution tools. A user can show that they "like" a piece of content. It's a lightweight way to show you like something and it's shared with their friends as well.

In the ad space, there's paid search. It's a good way to show something to someone who has explicitly said they are interested in something. But there are a lot of people who maybe aren't searching for a product but they'd still be interested in buying it. Facebook is an effective way to reach those customers before it occurs to them to search. For ads you can target by city or state, you can target by age and sex and relationship status.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 03/25/09 at 8:27 AM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SES New York 2009, Social Media

March 24, 2009

Advanced SEO Strategies: Integrating Analytics, Usability, Persuasion and Journalism

This is a solo presentation by Matt Bailey, a member of the SES Advisory Board and president of Site Logic Marketing. Jumping right in...

At the base level, all you have are words. Words are the building blocks of communication, and it's never more true than on your Web site. They are necessary to persuade people to take action. Mao Zedong said, "Words are like little dynamite sticks in people's minds." By diffusing the power of words, he was able to take control of his country. We have to do the same on our Web sites. Create a reaction in the user's mind that says, "This site helps me find what I'm looking for."

Communicate at a level beyond "about us". If content can go on someone else's site, then you need different content.

Rule 1: Call things what they are

Get rid of the corporate speak, the jargon, the branded tendencies. Realize that your consumers may not talk the same way as you. If you're trying to widen your reach beyond the brand to people who need what you've got, you have to be willing to go beyond the brand.

Rule 2: Co-dependency of words

How do search engines rank Web sites? It's the question that's on our mind. Who are the search engines trying to satisfy? The Web site creator? No, the searcher. You have machines trying to please people. The search engines are machines that want to be real boys -- the Pinocchio principle.

Start with SEO 101 -- the biggest thing you can do for your rankings is optimizing the page titles. The SERP is the first marketing message a searcher will see about your company. Make sure the page title is a call to action. You have 60 characters to get your message to your user in the SERP.

Headlines, subheadings, bullet points and paragraph headers are what are used as a navigational device to find out if it's worth reading, if it's what we're looking for.

Search engines are a means to an end. It's the way that you get to your customer. Meta descriptions are used in your SERP description -- this effects your marketing message. Links are the nuts and bolts of the Internet. They are critical for search engines to find your site. Give alternate text because there may be times that no images show up. You never know how your site will render so give an alternate option.

Rule 3: Context

Context is important for images. Use the alt attribute on images so that you can explain to the search engine what the image is about. Universal search means that everything is searchable and everything is rankable.

Location of words makes a difference. According to a Jacob Neilson study, 79 percent of users scan a Web page; 16 percent read word for word. Scanning is done through headlines, sub-headings, bulleted lists, paragraph headers and content arrangement. Make sure you follow understood conventions -- for example, never use blue underlined text if it's not a link. Make sure your navigation supports the content. People should be able to look at navigation and know what section they're in.

Rule 4: Credibility

People surveyed said privacy policy, SSL, address and phone number is what makes a site credible. But when put in front of a computer, layout, typography, font size and color schemes were what they saw as factors of credibility. Most importantly, it's about readability. Small text, scrolling, blinking, rotating, text on fire and low contrast are bad for readability.

Rule 5: Variety of words

The top 10 keywords that generate traffic actually get less traffic than the long-tail put together. The top 10 terms are just 3 percent of the traffic coming to your site. Don't forget the long tail.

Rule 6: Performance of words

Anchor term (primary keyword):

• 2.7 minutes average time on site
• 46 percent of visits were less than 20 seconds
• Term conversion rate was 2.2 percent
• 1.8 percent conversion rate from the home page
• 4.3 percent conversion rate from category pages

In response they de-optimized the home page. The also found that by adding the brand name to the optimization process, average time on site, visit time and conversion rates all went up. Segment your analytics by how users come into the site and you'll figure out if something is wrong with your landing pages.

Rule 7: Branding

Searches are refined as a researcher goes along. First they look for their need, then they start adding brands. Year-long trends can help you see when people are looking for your product. There are needs at different times.

Rule 9: Clarity

(I have no idea what happened to rule number 8...)

A home page that serves as a directional is better than a destination. It should push people to where they want to go. You should have content that satisfies the need and shows that you have the answer to what they're looking for. Committing to what your product or service can do is necessary.

Regionally there are variations of words. Verbal variations exist, too. There are many words that can be used to describe the same thing. Understand that people look for what you offer in many different ways. Writing requires that you do research into keywords to find out what people are calling what you do. Search engines are getting better at understanding context behind semantics. Search history may help to refine your search when the word means more than one thing.

This has international implications. Your product may have an accent in it, but searchers may not search with the accent. He doesn't recommend you optimize your site for the grammatically incorrect version, but when you bid use the more searched word. Avoid euphemisms and slang.

Searcher types

1. The sharpshooter: They want an answer right now.
2. The shotgun searcher: They know what they want but they're open to suggestions.
3. The artillery searcher: For example, you were told by a doctor that you have this. As soon as you get home you hit the search engine and read everything you can.

Personality types include: the planner, the decision maker, the browser, the price shopper (no loyalty), and the last-minute shopper.

Value exchange: What you're asking for from a visitor has to be of equal value to the searcher. Don't ask for more info than you need. If you ask for too much, it's not worth the user's time right now. Make sure you're giving value back.

Sales 101

• Elevator pitch
• Benefits
• Rapport

Persuasion is based on three elements:

1. Logic
2. Emotion
3. Credibility

Get more info on the blog, www.SiteLogicMarketing.com/blog.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 03/24/09 at 2:03 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SES New York 2009, Search Engine Optimization, Usability

March 16, 2009

Highlights from This Month's SEO Newsletter

The SEO Newsletter touched down in your inbox and on our site this afternoon. Feel free to subscribe if you enjoy a healthy monthly dose of comprehensive Internet marketing news and articles. For those who require a little persuasion before committing precious time to an article, this is what you can look forward to in this month's featured articles.

Press Release Basics for SEO Success

BC's senior tech writer Paula Allen covers the bases of optimizing press releases. From SEO considerations to the distribution channels that will give you the most bang for your buck to tips for attracting social media visibility, look no further for an intro guide to search engine optimization through public relations.

This Wednesday, TopRank Online Marketing's Lee Odden will be presenting a webinar in partnership with RPWeb. The webinar, Using Your News to Drive SEO, will focus on tactics to take advantage of news search and the potential traffic it can generate. As mentioned in the article, social media marketing can be connected to online PR with stellar results. Once your press release is live, don't forget to monitor the buzz.

10 Engaging Ways to Incorporate Engagement Objects

Katie Wertz brings you a quick-and-dirty top-ten list of engagement object ideas. Well-known features such as videos and images sit alongside the less-touted polls, maps and macros. I won't give it all away here, but each category includes an example or two that will stir up engagement, if not your lunch. (I swear I'm talking about the meatloaf cake and not Christopher Hart's serenade.) [I am absolutely having meatloaf for dinner. Nom nom nom. --Susan]

There are plenty of resources out there to help get your creative juices flowing. Copyblogger has explained how the rule of three is a magic number for engagement, bringing storytelling, stickiness and humor to a whole new level. In fact, I think crafting your content around any number helps draw in eyeballs. As David Snyder of Search & Social points out, there are no hard rules (or ethics) in social media. The key is to have an idea of what works in your niche and with people in general.

So there's your taste of what's going on in this month's newsletter. If I've whet your appetite, turns out these topics and more are covered in great detail in our upcoming SEO All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies. When the time comes, you can bet we'll be sharing our big news through PR channels and engagement objects. 'Cause hey, even a two-inch thick instructional manual can be engaging.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 03/16/09 at 5:25 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Linking Strategy, News & PR, SEO Tips & Tricks, Social Media

February 11, 2009

301 Redirect, How Do I Love You? Let Me Count the Ways

Alex Bennert, Wall Street Journal is the moderator for troublemaking panelists Jordan Kasteler, Co-Founder, SearchandSocial.com, Carolyn Shelby, CShel, Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts, and Jonah Stein, ItsTheROI.

Carolyn Shelby is up first. She gave me her presentation so I'll be adding the really important stuff from what she actually says. She's not going to be covering specifically technical examples.

In a perfect world, Web site relaunches would never be more complicated than changing a domain or the presentation (look and feel) of existing data. In the real world, relaunches HAVE to be done to fix horrendous URL structure and just general wrongness with the existing Web site.

She worked on one site that was all static URLs but they screwed up the implementation. Twice. The result was URLs that were ugly, spammy and not at all easy to 301. They had to set up 301s for every single URL individually.

Uses for 301s (review):

These are painful, but necessary to the long term success of the site and the sanity of the SEOs, content creators, and tech people.

• Redirects users and bots from the old location of a given Web page to the new location (URL).
• Automatically redirects users from an old domain to a new domain.
• Automatically redirects users from alternate TLDs to the main TLD (usually the .com).
• Corrects canonical issue.s
  • www vs non-www
  • Index.* to /
• Keeps unauthorized users and bots from accessing live development environments, redirects them to main site. (IP-specific delivery)

IP-specific delivery gets a bad wrap but there are legitimate uses for it, like this one. Sometimes you have to have a live site so you don't want that available to be indexed. Hence, IP delivery.

Basic relaunch:

• New frosting, but the cake is original recipe. [Mmm, cake]
  • Possibly moving to a new domain.
  • URLs might be losing or changing file extensions. It's important when you're moving into, say, WordPress.
  • New pages, but few new pages are replacing old pages.
  • Few old pages are "disappearing".
  • No significant changes to pre-existing information architecture or nomenclature.
• Small number of redirects required.
• The naming scheme from the old site had consistent, easily defined patterns AND the new site is also consistent and definable.
  • ^/dir-old/(.*).html$ -> /dir-new/$1
  • ^/dir-old/(.*).html$ -> /$1.php
  • ^/dir-old/(.*)$
• Just use normal .htacces and, you'll be fine. Unless you're using Microsoft. More on that later.

Complicated relaunch:

• The frosting is all new AND the cake is a different flavor, a different shape, and has fruity filling between the layers now.
• The site is large (more than a few hundred indexed pages) and...
• There are significant information architecture and/or nomenclature changes that do not follow a consistent pattern.

Before you begin:

• You should have a list or spreadsheet of:
  • All of your current site's indexed pages (and their URLs).
  • All of your current site's indexed pages with backlinks.
  • The relationships/translations from the OLD to the NEW.
• You should also have an understanding of:
  • How your redirects will be added to your system.
  • How you will be watching/tracking your 404s.
  • Any weirdness or quirkiness unique to your CMS or Web server.

Give these things to your teams. You need a map in case you have to do this manually. In her earlier example, they literally had someone just watching for errors so that he could update the link every single time.

Preparation:

• Find a software package to do some of the reports for you:
  • List of all indexed pages.
  • List of all pages w/ back links.
• For tracking 404s:
  • Learn to read httpd error logs, or
  • Install software to help monitor the traffic.
    • Mint is nice and quick.
    • AXS by XAV is old school, but free.
    • Webmaster Tools and GA are a little slow, but if you don't care about latency, these work as well.
• The other reports have to be assembled manually.
  • This is why God makes interns.

Why the prep is important:

• Your lists will help you write the redirects.
• The patterns (or lack of) determine the method you use.
  • Regular .htaccess Mod_Rewrite or Mod_Alias
    • Note: Mod_Rewrites execute BEFORE Mod_Alias, no matter how they're listed in the file.
  • A hash table for large (hundreds or thousands) of redirections.
• If a URL isn't in your reports, skip it.

Fewer redirects, faster response times. If something doesn't have backlinks or isn't indexed, who care?

Give the engines the new site map AND the old site map so that they can find the 301s faster.

Once you've done your implementation, it's time to bite your nails and see what happens.

What to expect:

• Major site overhauls will see anywhere from a 20 percent drop in traffic to being completely dropped from the index.
• Recovery time is generally 6 to 18 weeks. After one week they started to see traffic coming back 15 percent week over week.
• The long tail traffic will suffer more than anything else.

You/your client/boss is not going to like this. Not at all. Prepare them well for it.

Recovery:

• Analytics should show 10-20 percent increases in traffic week over week once recovery has begun.
• Reports showing indexed pages will show more and more of the new pages, and fewer and fewer of the old URLs, week over week.
• The sick feeling in your stomach starts going away.

Hurrah!

Alex mentions that you should use Google Webmaster Tools and download the table to get the page with internal links information.

Stephan Spencer follows up Carolyn.

You can (should) download his powerpoint from http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/301-redirect.ppt. He warns that he goes far too quickly for taking notes, just so you know. This will be short. It may involve me crying. [You've gotta appreciate the warning. --Virginia]

He loves rewrite rules and thus you should be using those instead. He likes Apache best but if you're using Microsoft go with the ISAPI_rewrite plugin.

[Sample rewrite rule here. I do not know what it means. Good luck.]

Become a master of pattern matching and learn all the mysterious signals. [Or, in my opinion, hire a great IT guy] It's incredibly easy to make errors in regular expressions. Learn what the "greedy" expressions are.

Stephan: "Let's go to a more complex example." [Livebloggers: wave the white flag]

The title of the current slide is "More Fun with Tracking Parameters". I think Stephan forgot the ironic quotes around "fun".

Compile your text files into a DBM file then make that a script. I don't know what that means but apparently it's faster.

Don't daisy-chain 301s.

Don't do conditional redirects. Matt Cutts will yell at you. Stephan has an article about it on Search Engine Land called Redirects: Good, Bad & Conditional. [This conflicts with Carolyn's advice from earlier.]

Now that Stephan has completely confused us, it's Jordan Kasteler who had to be peeled away from the bar to be here. Alex says that we should write the slurs when we hear them. No way, that takes more work.

He's covering 301s from a social media point of view. Michael Gray posted about this on Search Engine Land.

Digg hates SEOs. Therefore submit on sites that are non-commercial, not SEO. After the hype is over, 301 to your real site.

301 from internal informational pages to product pages. [Shady, shady, shady.]

White hat version: Use a multi-story strategy and then make it all one page and 301 all the stories to one page. Each will get links that will then be consolidated.

Choose your hooks wisely. Some hooks build links over time and you don't want to redirect those. Resource hooks build links for a long time. Instead, add internal links to pass link equity around.

Some link value can be lost in 301 redirects. Do NOT redirect to your home page -- from what some have seen, Google doesn't pass anchor text when it's redirected to the home page.

Use your keywords in your page and social submission titles because that's what they'll use to link back.

Consolidate to one canonical URL structure.

You can follow his twitter @UtahSEOPro.

Jonah Stein will restore order to these proceedings. He's going to tell us why 301s aren't always the answer.

Back in the day, the spammy option was the Meta refresh, then the JavaScript versions and so on.

Eventually duplicate content became a bad thing (back in 2005) and then in 2006 canonicalization showed up on the scene after the BigDaddy update.

What are your other redirect options: 302, 303, 307.

Most people have heard of the 302 because of hijacking, but there are legit uses.

Vanity URLs don't need to be 301 redirected. If it's shorter, that might be the better choice so go ahead and use the 302.

Geo-detection is a good use for a 302.

Rapidly changing offers are good candidates for 302s as well. The base page will accumulate link equity while the offers change.

You can bring a microsite back into the fold with a 302.

If you want to create search friendly URLs and you can't get around your company roadblocks, create new URLs with better URLs and 302 them.

Http vs https: Avoid canonical confusion when the payer or application is moved to the https layer. Users are unlikely to link to the https.

Third-party shopping carts can be masked this way.

Pretty affiliate links! But be careful and open about this.

307 is the mythical beast. It's not often seen in the wild. It's almost like the 302 but not. 302 uses a 303 get method but the 307 uses a post method. [I don't know what that means.]

Q&A

Does page rank really transfer with 301 redirects?

Stephan: This needs to be qualified. PageRank in the toolbar is almost a random number generator. It means nothing. If your rankings dropped, that's something to be concerned about.

Jordan: You don't need to change the extension. You can [do something technical].

Jonah: It could have been that you changed your page, not that you moved it.

Isn't 301ing against Digg's terms of use?

Jordan: Yes.

Does the home page being linked with and without the slash count as canonical?

Stephan: They're the same URL.

Jonah: It'll just be recorded differently in the analytics.

Is there a place to test rewrites before we go live with them?

Stephan: I use a dev site.

And we're done.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/11/09 at 5:15 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Linking Strategy, Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SMX West 2009

December 4, 2008

Tell Tale Signs That Your Client Gets Search Marketing

Once again, Chris Hart from Bruce Clay's East Coast office joins us with some thoughts on how to convert your clients to the SEO religion.

As the SEO Priest it is as much my job to listen to clients as it is to preach to them. Conversation is a two way street, after all. Over time I have developed a simple way to listen for when a client has begun to understand search engine marketing and can relate it to their own online business.

Below I have outlined four conversation components to help SEOs get an understanding of how well a client understands the search engine optimization needs of their Web site.

Listen To Their Questions

We have all heard numerous SEO 101 questions from a client's marketing departments and IT departments alike. "Do links count and why should I link to other sites?" "Does it matter what kind of redirect we use? Don't they all do the same thing?"

The key to help answer these foundational questions is education and training and very open conversations. With every project we should know that extra hours will be needed up front in order to get everyone on the same page. As you get your clients speaking and understanding the same language, you will recognize the maturation of their thinking as the questions change.

The most noticeable change is in the format of the questions. Instead of "No, WHY?" you start to hear "Yes, we need to do this. What are our options?" When the format of the question has changed, you can infer that your clients are beginning to understand that there are specific ways of making a search-friendly site and that perhaps they realize that by no stretch of the imagination is any solution a cookie cutter.

Identify Tasks and Task Completion

The second phase of the transformation from SEO confusion to SEO competence occurs when you start to talk about what is hindering the site and how to fix these problems. As with any quest to improve, there must be an acknowledging that something is wrong so that the issue can be addressed and fixed.

Remember, you must move slowly here. Start by putting issues into easy-to-understand categories. Hint: use their vocabulary rather than "SEO speak". Then work with them to divide large tasks into smaller, more manageable projects. By doing this, you and your client have begun to identify where the up-front effort and resources must go and what tasks will dove tail with each other.

In many cases you will realize that the organizational structure may be a barrier to progress as much as the complexity of the task itself. This usually becomes self-evident as tasks are checked off after completion. If you find certain tasks are not being addressed or completed, you will know which department manager to key in on.

Organizational Issues

At this point the client has had a chance to metabolize education and training. By now they likely realize that changes will need to be made to their current processes and perhaps to their organizational structure in order to eliminate search marketing barriers. The next step is to look at the organization structure that is currently in place and figure out what needs to change in order for search marketing efforts to succeed. That change could simply be a directive to the right people, but could also be a serious structural change.

In many cases, when a company moves their traditional business into the online world, they try to duplicate exactly what has worked for them in the past. As we all know, this does not work most of the time and may negatively affect your online efforts.

This why it is important to recognize bottlenecks, know who understands the search marketing process, and identify those who do not understand the organization's search marketing goals and their role in the SEO process. The most valuable thing about this part of the communication cycle is minimizing or removing any barriers. Once eliminated, the organization is left with highly engaged and motivated individuals ready to work together for a common project.

Feedback From Past Tasks Are Rolled Into New Initiatives

The final client conversation component you should look for is when they start to make statements that clearly draw upon their new-found education. This information comes in the form of data from their analytics tools (it's unfortunate how many companies don't have this until they start an SEO project) or results from and reviews of prior projects and tasks. For example, a client may say, "While that Flash site looked awesome, we know that no one found it using the search engines and we shouldn't use our resources on something like that again." Even more telling is when search marketing initiatives are built into new projects along with clearly defined criteria for success and metrics for measuring that success.

I hope these conversation check point help you as they have helped me, and please remember to always enjoy your client conversations. Just as you look to a client's community demographics to help understand their audience, your ability to help your clients begins and ends with understanding what is important to them.

Posted by Guest Author on 12/ 4/08 at 4:35 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization

November 13, 2008

Mostly Viral Top Traffic Alternatives, or SEO on a Shoestring Budget

Why are all these rooms so cold? I have my gloves back on again and I'm still shivering.

Carolyn Shelby is our moderator for this session. Speakers are Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com; Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear.com; Jessie Stricchiola, Founder & CEO, Alchemist Media, Inc.; and Gary Kirk, Co-Founder, Technical Director, Rating Room Ltd.

Gary Kirk is up first.

Three basics for a successful site:

• Good, relevant links to your Web site: He's not talking about that in this session.
• No obstacles to search engine spiders: He's not talking about this either.
• Content that attracts and converts: This one he's talking about.

Good content is available for $0 so he'll be concentrating on that. He's also focusing on local search because 90 percent of transactions are local.

Why is content king?

Google can't send valuable, relevant users to your site without it. It's a vital component in the decision making process for visitors. It doesn't have to cost a cent, but it is always worth investing time into. You're the best person to write it because you know your business. It doesn't have to cost anything because it should all already be in your head. It doesn't have to be terribly detailed either.

To beat the people above you, you need to look at the top ten results in Google. Local business are up against Yellow Pages, directories, Google Local/Maps, franchises, review sites and others. Sometimes Google does indeed value big sites more, so you'll have to pick your battles.

The way to do it is through content. You can be more granular. You know your business better than they do. You have a choice between being a provider or being THE provider. Good content on local business Web sites will reassure the visitor "this is the right service provider for me". When you get a testimonial, don't just publish it. Tell people what you did in that case by describing the services and process. The best that many non-local competitors can do is to provide a list of potential providers of the service.

Link to testimonials in two ways: with their name and location. This way you will get traffic from location-based searches and from service pages, so you should link with the service you provided.

Most local searches are unique and combine geography (town, country, state, neighborhood, zip code, etc.) with a service descriptor ("plumbing", "blocked sinks", etc.). You need to pick the ones that are you target area -- don't pick every query, but all the important ones. Once you have a decent list, take those to Google and do searches to see who your competitors are.

Rewards from local content:

• Conversion from visitor to customer can be remarkable for specific searches.
• Targeting lots of well researched text phrases can and often does work fast.
• Better organic results, often combined with PPC, can reduce overall ad costs.

Marty Weintraub is our next speaker. He engages in a little rant about how his blog vanished. Hee. He's so energetic.

He reads the session notes. He promises to keep this lily white. Nothing that you wouldn't tell your mom. Thanks, Marty!

Okay, the assumption is that you have you, your WordPress blog and a grudge.

Set up to publish quick, clean and viral. For this, we're assuming a primary and secondary publishing system. How do you mashup WordPress into your site? Integrate it to pull in headlines from your blog that will relate to the page content. Make sure you're publishing cleanly.

If you have existing content + fanatical attitude + half a brain = free content.

Figure out what you do already and who cares about it. What communications already emanating from our company might have viral proclivity if published properly? What if we could get others to champion our content? Email is the greatest social network.

[This all sounds much less amusing than it really is. It is, however, just as schizophrenic as it looks. Wish you were here.]

Good content can come from:

• Media relations
• Investor relations
• Community
• Customer
• Internal
• Human interests
• Public relations

Nuclear "send to friends" degrees of separations. Everyone you know knows someone else. Make them share it.

Believe in "signs of human life". Mash evidence of it onto PPC landing pages.

Viral means getting everyone else to do your work for you. Vanity bait with your business feed, talk about people you know, about your employee product recommendations, requests of input, link out to non-competitive and complimentary resources.

What's already going on?

• Owner's manual updates, product registration
• Any press releases
• Internal procedure and event logistics
• Product recall information and other disasters
• Weekly specials
• Annual report

Tips for content SEO sourcing, SEO success:

• Set up a schedule and stick to it. Example: every Tuesday at 1:00.
• Don't write the Magna Carta every time.
• List posts are famous for a reason.
• Link out/vanity bait other writers.

Time for a tactic. An experimental tactic. One that was talked about during the SMX Advanced. Oh, it's the one that Lisa called totally unethical. Hee. The nice part about this is that now I don't have to recap it. You all know where to find Lisa's rant about SMX, right? Don't worry, Lisa and Marty are BFFs now.

Brett Tabke wraps it up. His presentation is called "What if there were no search engines?"

Brett used to work for John Deere and they used to do awesome things online. Then one day the search engine traffic just vanished. What happened? The CMS was throwing 404 errors and there was no way to search. So if the search engines go away, where do you get your traffic?

Google generates 80 to 90 percent of search engine referral, depending on who you ask. Sixty-four percent of Internet users arrive at sites by direct navigation.

Where do you get your traditional traffic? From type-in traffic, from reciprocal link exchanges, strategic alliances. Directories still offer some traffic, but stay away from fake directories, affiliate farms and FFAs, top 100 sites, and awards managers.

[And they whine about nofollow links on Twitter profiles. Am I the only one who thought that was awesome?]

Sources of traffic:

• Press releases and the local paper are low cost alternatives.
• Contests can be good lead generators. You need to do you homework first or you'll run into legal issues or management issues.
• Awards are old and directed but they still work.
• Guest books are still out there. They tend to work better for female centric sites.
• E-greeting cards are dead in Brett's opinion.
• Email newsletters still work, but they have a downside: huge commitment, monthly work, labor intensive.
• Send to a friend.
• Kids! They're great at viral marketing. They swap SMS messages and mention and recommend products.
• Pete and Repeat.
• Usenet and forums. Always check the TOS of sites to see what is acceptable. There is little that is more powerful than a good old profile referral.
• Coupons. Nearly 20 percent of U.S. Internet users have redeemed a coupon online. Sixty percent of Pubcon attendees used a coupon.

[I just noticed that Brett isn't using the official Pubcon PPT template. Branding fail.]

Giveaways are big.
Blogs are great.
Traditional offliners work -- classifieds, trade magazines, radio and TV commercials.

The main thing is that once you get people to your site you need to DO something with them. Give them great service. Email, email, email. Speed. Answer quick and give them a real response.

An audience member suggests sending out reminder emails halfway through the month to get people to come read your monthly newsletters.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Linking Strategy, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks

Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All

No fancy intro here, just right to the content. The moderator for this panel is Rand Fishkin. Speakers are super funny Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optimization Architect, Microsoft; Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Google; and Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search. Rahul Lahiri, VP of Search Product Management, Ask, is a might show. Hmm.

Ben D'Angelo is up first. He's been with Google a little more than three years. I think that means he went to Google straight out of grade school.

What are duplicate content issues? There are actually multiple disjoint problems.

• Duplicate content within your site or sites:
  • Multiple URLs point to the same page or similar pages
  • Different countries (same language)
• Duplicate content across other sites:
  • Syndicated content
  • Scraped content

The guiding principle behind the search engines' indexing is ONE URL for one piece of content. Why? Because users don't like duplicates in results. It saves resources in Google's index, leaving more room for other pages from your site. And it saves resources on their server. [So Ben is telling us to keep duplicate content low to save Google money? Man, that stock price must really be suffering.]

Sources of duplicate content:

• Multiple URLs pointing to the same page
  • www vs. non-www
  • Session IDs, URL parameters
  • Printable versions of pages
  • CNAMEs
• Similar content on different pages
  • Manufacturer's databases
  • Different countries

How does Google handle this? They cluster like content and pick the best representative. There are variations on this depending on where it is in the pipeline. Different filters are used for different types of duplicate content. In general, it's just a filter and it's not going to destroy your site.

The problem comes in when Google doesn't choose the page you want or makes a mistake in clustering. You need to take back control.

Use 301 redirects for exact duplicates, like tracking URLs, and to solve www vs. non-www issue. You can also address exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools, but that only solves the problem for Google. He demos briefly.

For near duplicates, no index or block with robots.txt. Things like printer pages and site clones should have this.

Domains by country are a little different. Different languages are not duplicate content. Same language, different country? Don't worry about it -- the right one will usually be okay. You can geo-target in GWT or use different TLDs to help Google recognize where the content belongs. Best of all is creating unique content for that country.

Leave out URL parameters if you can. Put that data into a cookie instead.

In Webmaster Tools you can check for all sorts of other problems too, like duplicate Title and Meta data. Fix those things.

If another site has content that duplicates yours, there's less that you can do.

Duplicate content from syndication should include a link back to your site to make the canonical origin clear. Another option is to syndicate different content than what you publish on your site. If you're publishing content you have syndicated, manage your expectations.

Don't worry about scrapers or proxies too much. They generally don't affect your rankings. If you're concerned, file a DMCA request or a spam report with Google.

Duplicate content best practices:

• Avoid duplicate content in the first place.
• Generate unique, compelling content for users.
• Don't be overly concerned with duplicate content.
• Let us know about any issues at the Webmaster Help Forum.

You can always check out the Webmaster Central Blog and check out the Webmaster discussion group.

Priyank Garg is next up. He's got a sore throat so he'll be brief. His voice is all scratchy. Aw.

Much of this will be similar to Ben's presentation -- I'll pull out the Yahoo-specific stuff. Like Google, Yahoo filters at several places in the pipeline. Session IDs and other "content neutral" parameters can really hurt your crawl queue. They might never get to the rest of your content because they're crawling the same page over and over with a session ID. "Soft" 404 pages can also cause duplicate content problems. Repeated elements (perhaps with just a keyword replace) lead to problems.

Abusive dupes include scrapers/spammers, weaving and stitching, etc.

• Slurp supports wildcards in robots.txt.
• Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to delete URLs or an entire path from the index for authenticated sites.
• Use the robots-nocontent tag on non-relevant parts of a page.
  • Robots-nocontent can be used to mark out boilerplate content
  • Robots-nocontent can be used for syndicated content that may be useful to the user in context but not for search engines.

You can do dynamic URL rewriting in Site Explorer. Tell them which parameters are content neutral for your sites:

• Ability to indicate parameter to remove URLs from site
• More efficient crawl with less duplicates
• Better site coverage as fewer resources are wasted on duplicates
• Fewer risks of crawler traps
• Cleaner URL, easier for user to read and more likely to be clicked
• Better ranking due to reduced link juice fragmentation -- it's equivalent to 301ing all the duplicates back to one URL, saves time because they don't have to crawl it

Derrick Wheeler is up. Here's a bit of vintage Derrick for you all: "This crowd is a perfect Web site. You're all unique. I would crawl, index and rank all of you." Rand interjects "That's dirty." Derrick: "But I wouldn't click or take action." Hee.

Final points (he likes to get these done first):

• Consider search engine crawler detection
• Know your parameters
• Link to URLs with parameters always in the same order
• Dig deep into search results for your domain
• Exclude duplicates by robots.txt first, Meta Robot exclusion second, and nofollow link attribute last
• Don't assume engines can't follow JavaScript
• Get a regular crawl report of your Web site
  • Request a tab file that includes: referring URL, fetched URL, redirect path with type, landing URL with status code, Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords
  • Open file using Excel 2007, sort by Title then landing URL
  • Review suspect URLs to look for dupes
• Focus on your strengths

Look for spider traps, adding a parameter and creating new pages every time you go back and forth several times.

Make sure that when you're creating sites for users, you still avoid spider traps. Just because you don't think the search engines will need to index it, doesn't mean that you don't have other pages that the search engines won't get to because they're busy with your trap.

Document why you're doing things. One site removed session IDs for search engines and got 10 million pages indexed. Down the line, someone forgot why it had been done, started giving session IDs to the engines again and their index pages plummeted again.

Look for things that might be causing problems, like dynamic breadcrumbs, based on how someone clicked through the site (Brookstone does this), related products, etc. They might be helpful for users but you're probably going to get into trouble. Make your internal linking consistent and useful. Some products might be able to live in multiple categories, but you need to make a decision.

Anytime you see related, sort or compare, think "possible duplicate content". When you see "select region" or "sign in", think duplicate content. Disallow those pages in your robots.txt. "Email an article", "send to a friend" -- think duplicate content.
Once you screw up the parameter order, it's hard to fix. Keep it consistent.

Use absolute links, not relative links, especially when switching between http:// and https://. Other people could link to you with https:// as well and you can't really do anything about that.

Priyank suggests going after the low-hanging fruit. Try the dynamic URLs first so that you can see the benefit right away.

Brent Payne asks: How do you credit a story properly when you're the Chicago Tribune? Can I get a link attribute or something? Just linking back doesn't work. Google tells me it's not a big deal but it is.

There's not so much that the reps can say to that. They're trying and he's already doing the right thing. Poor Brent.

Derrick doesn't think there is a solution right now. (He also reminded everyone that he's an in-house SEM, not a search engine representative.)

How detrimental are different link IDs?

Priyank: Every different URL linking to the same content is duplicate content. That's why you should use dynamic URL rewriting.

Ben: We try to handle that automatically. We might have to crawl the page once but we try to learn which parameters don't affect the page content.

[Most of these questions are site specific, so I'm skipping them.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 12:06 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks, Yahoo

November 12, 2008

Alternative Discovery & SEO: Feeds, PDFs & Blog SEO

Back from yet another dismal boxed lunch. Honestly, food shouldn't be so depressing. Or soggy. Significantly less depressing than lunch? Moderator Joe Laratro and speakers Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts, George Aspland Founder & President, eVision, LLC and Greg Jarboe President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com. Rick Klau from Google didn't make it.

Bear with me, my computer refused to turn back on after lunch so it had to be punished with a hard reboot. We're still trying to make up the lost progress.

George Aspland is up first to teach us about optimizing PDFs. His goal is to teach us how to get higher rankings and more click-throughs from SERP listings for PDFs and also how to take advantage of active links in PDFs.

His advice is to use mostly formatted as text. Just like in HTML, search engines can't read text as an imagine. What you get when you do that is just page numbers being indexed which isn't useful to rank for anything.

Also, optimize the text in the document. Pay special attention to the headline in a PDF. Like regular results, Google includes snippets from the PDF and puts the words and phrases of the query in bold.

It's very important to update the Document Title. It's just as important as the Title tag is on a Web Page. Double check to be sure that you've put in a proper Title. If not, it will just choose a title for you from the text in the PDF (usually the first headline), which will not entice people to click-through to this document.

To update the Title in Word 2003, just go to File, Properties and fill in the proper box. It's better to update your title in Acrobat. Word will put "Microsoft Word" in front of your Title which isn't optimal.

How to get your PDF indexed: Link to it from one or more pages that already indexed. Simple.

In order to take advantage of active hyperlinks, you have to make them in the first place: For text URLs, format the look of your URLs (Acrobat won't make it blue and underlined), export/print as PDF, Open with Acrobat Standard or Pro. In Pro: Advanced > Links > Create from URLs.

Adding links gives search engines a way to travel out of the PDF and onto the site. This is good for PDFs that you're keeping on your site as well as ones that you're distributing to customers.

You can promote your PDF by linking to it from multiple pages on your site and by getting other sites to link to it too.

Download "Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines - 2008" from their blog: evisionsem/blog

Greg Jarboe is our next speaker.

His first point is that 30 percent of searches on Google sites aren't web searches. It's a percentage that's only increasing. 15 percent are video searches.

Optimizing .docs

Google News pulls press releases, which are usually given to the wire services as Word docs. It's time stamped, so recent is better. You would optimize your press release like any other Web page, so use your keywords. Also in Google News, headlines count more than Body copy. The first paragraph is worth more than the last paragraph.

Google Blog Search examines a blog's title, content and popularity. It indexes blogs by their feeds which will be checked frequently for new content. Blog searches reward recent posts and tend to be indexed faster than regular Web search.

CEO Watch used SEO Samba to optimize their Web site and RSS feeds and saw a traffic jump over time.

YouTube examines dozens of aspects including hits and rating. YouTube gets more searches per month than Yahoo. If you're not in video, you're missing out on the second biggest search audience.

What's different about what they look at:

• Hits
• Comments
• Ratings

You have to have views before you'll get rankings, and you have to allow comments or it won't do well.

Universal search incorporates all of the "other stuff" that's in the 30 percent of other search. It's not just about optimizing for that 30 percent, it's about the fact that that 30 percent is creeping into the 70 percent.

Stephan Spencer is next.

More people use Blogger than Movable Type in this audience. Almost everyone uses Wordpress. [Maybe now I can convince IT to change us over to WordPress.]

Big SEO mistakes for bloggers:

• Leaving the Title Tags auto-generated
• Squandering your "crawl equity" by letting pages get indexed that don't deserve to be.
• Having multiple homes for your blog (www vs non-www).
• Not using Optional Excerpt to minimize duplicate content.
• Not using rel=no follow.
• Overreliance on date-based archives.
• No stability in keyword focus on category & tag pages (fix with sticky posts).
• Suboptimial URLs (too long, too many words, too many directories).
• Only one RSS feed and it's un-optimized.
• Hosting blog/feed URLs on a domain you don't own.
• Using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally.

Rejig internal linking structure

• Tag clouds and Tag pages and tag conjunction pages -- carefully. With great power comes great responsibility.
• Related posts
• Top 10 posts
• Next & Previous / pagination

Use the Web Developer for Firefox on your pages to spot overuse of links. Also? Use a sticky post on your tag pages so that the first post will always set your keyword theme.

You also need to optimize your Title and URLs. A good headline doesn't mean you'll have a good Title tag. Use rel=no follow to direct your PageRank.

Other hints for optimizing your Blog's:

For your Titles:

• Thin Slicing: make quick decisions, don't over think.
• Only really works if you're an expert.
• SEO Title Tags plugin for WP will allow you to mass edit Title tags.
• Name your blog something with good keywords.

Optimize your URLs:

• Shorter URLs get twice as many clicks as longer URLs in the SERPs.
• Subdomains/subdirectories/newdomains? Figure it out from your business rules.
• Rewrite to contain keywords, hyphens not underscores
• Test and optimize

Optimize your anchor text:

• Make the post's title a link to the permalink page
• Use SEOMoz Backlink Anchor Text Analysis tool or BLA
• (tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer) to look for links

Minimize Duplicate Content:

• Use Optional Excerpts -- paraphrase the post and only put the content on the permalink page.
• Your dates should not be H1 tags
• Use emphasis tags

Optimize your RSS feeds:

• Full text, not summaries
• 20 or more items in your feed
• Multiple feed (by category, latest comments, comments by post)
• Keyword-rich items
• Your brand name in the item
• Your most important keyword in the site container
• Don't use source tracking parameters.
• Fix your description field

For a bunch of goodies about optimizing your blog, email him at SEO@Netconcepts.com

Q&A

Why would you want to do full text when the scrapers are going to steal it?

Stephan: it's going to happen no matter what. You're going to frustrate your core audience with a summary feed. I wouldn't worry about the scrapers. They can scrape the HTML just as easily. Put a link or a photo in the bottom of your posts so that they're linking back to you when they repost it.

Does changing the slug 301 the old URL to the new one?

Stephan: Yes. In fact it links from the original to whatever the newest one is, not just to the one right after it.

We already have RSS feeds with information, should we have a blog with that same information?
Greg: Do commentary on the information, not just republish it.
Stephan: Think of your blog as a microsite for those links.

Is there any value in putting current content into a PDF?
George: It creates duplicate content.

Where is the Optional Excerpt?
Stephan: It's on the update page but you also need to update the template to 'if it's not the permalink page and optional excerpt is defined, use it'.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/12/08 at 3:19 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks

November 11, 2008

Discover Techniques Used by Enterprise-Level SEOs/SEMs

Last session of day one! YAY! Joe Laratro is moderating the SIXTH session that I'm blogging today. Our panelists are Marshall D. Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, New York Times, on the web; Bill Hunt, Search Effectiveness Team Lead, IBM.com, Global Strategies; Ash Nallawalla, Traffic Manager, Yellow Online, Sensis Pty Ltd; and Scott Polk, Senior SEO Analyst, Bruce Clay, Inc. (formerly of Edmunds.com which is how he got this gig). Scott is absolutely coming in for abuse during this recap. I mock because... well, because I can, honestly.

Marshall Simmonds is our first speaker. NYT has a great many properties that they oversee. He's not going to bother to talk about all the basic stuff that everyone knows.

You can't tell a journalist that you're going to write content or that he needs to write content differently. There's a defensive wall there. You have to establish your knowledge and expertise first. Understand the topic, department and division. Ask/answer the questions that they should ask. Explain experiences with metrics and dollars. Be ready to support the plan and for pushback. Find quick wins, leverage relationships and get buy-in.

If you want to see how they do SEO on NYTimes.com, look at the movie section. That's where they first got buy-in.

The first thing they had to do was get the template optimized. They pushed back first and then pulled down the registration walls. They exposed the archives back to 1851. They have monthly network-wide communications, giving each segment what they need to know the most, exposing the quick wins and showing weak points. They're constantly training on SEO basics.

NYT has seen a 223 percent growth since 2006.

Hearst Corporation is different. They focus on audits and reassessments and offer checklists to push SEO progress. They hold technical troubleshooting and teaching workshops for writers, editors, producers. They work on training for evangelism.

For the Toys R Us site, it was about giving the appropriate people control of key on-page elements.

With TV Guide, back when Heroes was actually cool, they were able to promote tie-in products to their specific audience. [Hee, Heroes bashing]

And more and more...

Mistakes to avoid:

• Walling off content
• Under-communicating success
• Not checking in with IT/Production/Design/Ad Sales departments
• Meta Keywords tag -- it's the biggest point of misinformation. Everyone thinks they can solve the problem with Meta tags. Make sure you're training on basics.
• Implementing the changes
• Excessive expectations: timeframes, growth -- SEO is long term. It's not a project, it's a process. They do it year over year.
• Lack of editorial oversight
• Underestimating raising awareness around search

The search "life cycle" is always changing within a company. Careful tracking is always your ally.

Bill Hunt steps up to the podium.

Identify and prioritize recommendations

• What's the issue?
• What are the recommendations?
• What's the search impact?
• What's the resource impact?

Monitor page level performance

If it's a tier-one word, it needs to be in the top four positions. List them out by need level, to give you priority.

Leverage your interconnected network

• Leverage enormous power to build link equity.
• Leverage partners and distributed content to increase link equity.

Integrated Keyword Performance Modeling

• What keywords are really converting in paid and organic?
• What are "low-hanging fruit" that can be optimized?
• What is the cannibalization effect of paid and organic?
• What are the business rules that trigger budget shifts?

Final Thoughts

• Feed the need for information and create compelling information consumers will pull and interact with on demand.
• Workflow integration is the key to success at the enterprise level. Get in front of the people who can change the stream.
• Close the awareness loop with search by monitoring increased demand for new keywords.
• Plan for and take advantage of the increased demand at search engines generated by offline. Don't fight the "who gets credit battle" -- one sets them up, one knocks them down. Work together.

Scott Polk is next. Hi, Scott.

SEO-Friendly CMS

Customization is key. You want to be able to control every element on page and with architecture.

How do you get SEO into the process? Become part of the process, requirements gathering/documentations, project life cycle, SEO QA, etc.

Internal SEO evangelism is never ending and very important.

[Why did I never notice before that Scott mumbles? Quickly?]

The best way to develop relationships is with beer. Food works, too, but mostly alcohol. [Facepalms.]

Get external support and validation. Use experts to prove your expertise.

Ash Nallawalla wraps things up. The site he works on has over two million pages, which is big for Australia.

What's different for big sites?

• Millions of pages and a handful of key terms
• Greater emphasis on site architecture
• Changes can be slow to implement and costly
• Many stakeholders to be consulted
• Easier to get unsolicited links
• Web platforms are usually not search engine friendly
• Site design practices aren't SEF
• Language on Web sites is "marketese", not user speak. Duplicate content abounds.
• Not enough words on Web pages
• Islands of information (Web sites) spread out the business
• Trademark/copyright statement discourage linking by others

Where should an SEO be in a large organization? Ash thinks they should answer directly to the CMO. They shouldn't be in IT.

Like the other speakers, Ash emphasizes how important educating the stakeholders is.

[Here my headache turned migraine-painful. I begged Kate Morris to take over. What's below? That's all her. I love her. Hee.]

I'm supposed to be liveblogging for Susan. Dude is concluding with a checklist. The man is almost done talking -- that's good. Something about an external SEO company. Who needs one of those?? Sending them to training? Can't they read?

...Oops! Missing stuff.

Need a linking budget... Man I don't know how Susan does this. Crazy woman. Need paid links? Did I hear him say use paid links?!?!?!

[Thanks, Kate! What an entertaining conclusion to our first day of PubCon liveblogging frenzy! If you see Susan, tell her to take it easy. She's got to last for two more days! --Virginia]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/11/08 at 5:12 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks

Top Shelf Organic SEO

Five minutes between sessions is not enough. In case you were wondering. Here we are in the very first real session of PubCon with moderator Mark Jackson, President and CEO, VIZION Interactive, Inc., and panelists Jill Whalen, CEO, High Rankings; Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Stragegies; Ash Nallawalla, Traffic Manager, Yellow Online, Sensis Pty Ltd; and Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc. This room is packed and I am so going to end up elbowing someone.

Jill Whalen is up first. She says this session is the Grey Goose of SEO.

She's going into the mythbusting business for her presentation.

SEO is NOT:

• Submission. You don't need to submit URLs to search engines, either by hand or using an XML Sitemap. If you have millions of pages, consider it but don't worry about it.
• Tricking the search engines. Work with the engines instead of trying to trick them.
• Following Google's guidelines. They're not your Bible.
• Stuffing keywords. Use them in ways that are natural to your content.
• Optimizing for one keyword phrase. You need to focus on more than one keyword phrase. The more phrases you optimize for, the more you have a chance to be found. Do your keyword research.
• Optimizing for the long tail.
• Creating validated XHTML with a tableless design. It's not a bad thing to do, it's just not SEO. So long as your page renders, don't worry so much. The engines will read your code.
• Submitting to low quality directories.
• An attempt to increase toolbar PageRank. Your goal is to increase qualified traffic, not to increase your PR.
• Placing your page in a specific position in SERPs. Rankings, in general, are a poor measurement these days.
• Proprietary methods and automated tools.

What is SEO? Making your Web site the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines. Have something remarkable (Seth Godin). You need to stand out from the crowd.

What's the best time for SEO? During the planning or redesign phase. You want to build SEO into your Web site.

Basic SEO strategy:

• Keyword research
• Site architecture layout
• Map phrases to pages
• Write compelling keyword-rich Title tags
• Write descriptive benefit-laden copy
• Get the word out (link building)

Next up is Ash Nallawalla who will be speaking on content.

SEO is always evolving. He works for the Australian Yellow Pages. Their challenge was to get content onto their pages, which usually consist of just a name, address and phone number. A more robust page might have a few "ad points", but there is very little crawlable content.

Since they couldn't add more content to the pages very easily, they built feeder sites to bring in qualified traffic and then take users to the listings.

The initial thinking was that they didn't want the search engines to see their content. As new thinking came in, they started adding Heading info. Traffic actually dropped because people were clicking the second result. They didn't submit a Sitemap and he wishes that they had. It would have sped up the indexing process.

They also tried to build an online magazine to bring in traffic. It wasn't bringing a lot of traffic. He looked into why this was so.

• Homegrown CMS was not fully optimized.
• The articles were good but did not have a clear call to action.
• The search box was below the fold.

They replaced the CMS with Joomla as a free trial, licensed a theme and borrowed some articles from the parent site. Every article linked to the index and to the advertisers. The search box was moved above the fold. They went from a 3 percent click through to a 33 percent click through.

They stopped PPC campaigns on the old site. He's trying to prove that the smaller site on the Joomla CMS will overtake the old site in traffic by Christmas.

Tips for outsourcing content:

• Use professionals from the specific niche that you're targeting.
• If you're using writers from Asia, budget in a local editor to fix the spelling, grammar and style (U.S. vs. British spellings).
• Local university students might be a good source of cheap labor.
• Have a good contract in place.

Remember: What you intend and what a search engine sees might not be the same thing. Double-check how your PDFs are getting indexed.

Our next speaker is Bill Hunt, who will be talking about hierarchy.

Apparently he's surprised by the number of people here. Seriously, packed room. The guy next to me just moved. I think he's tired of my typing.

There's some discussion of the algorithm that I don't understand but that's okay. I don't have to because the point is that it's all about relevance.

Keyword relevance requires prominence: in the Title tag, in the Heading, in the sub-heading, in the body and in the link text. Can a simple, non-thinking spider figure out what something is about?

Competitor research is a good way to figure out where your target should be.

He disagrees with Jill in terms of placement. You can do placement a little bit through competitive research.

Disney World's site is Flash heavy, but they're good with "progressive degradation". When you surf the Internet on the phone, degradation is what makes it actually render gracefully. It ensures that error traps are not blocking the engines and that key text is available in XML layers (if you're using Flex).

Internet relevancy relies on:

• Link authority
• How many quality sites/pages are linked to this site/page?

Thematic hubs:

• How relevant are the sites/pages linking to the page?
• Does the exact keyword phrase appear?
• Use tag clouds.

Creating theme hubs:

• It's about linking to the relevant pages and back to emphasize the authority of the page.

You need to balance link authority, link popularity and relevancy. Look not just at the number but at the relative page rank. More high-quality links is the real goal. Run a link tool and find who is linking to your home page and ask them to link to the right page instead of just the home page.

Key questions:

• Is my content linkable?
  • Does this product, news release or event create interest where someone would link to it?
• Is my content portable?
  • Do you have anything you can pass along? PDF, video, widget?
  • Have you included "forward to friends"? Make sharing easy.
• Is my content findable?
  • Have you given it a relevant name and meta data?
• Have you syndicated your portable content?
  • Has it been submitted or shared with key influencers?

Last but not least is our own Bruce Clay. He's taking us to the future. Talk slow, BC.

There are a number of things going on that he's going to talk about.

Behavior-based Search Impact

It's not just personalization, it's overall behavior. Java can be code, coffee or the Caribbean. But even if everyone is looking for travel, it's still granular.

Behavior-based search changes the perception of ranking entirely. Monitors will only pick up the "vanilla" search before the community results get factored in. Bruce can't pretend to be a 17-year-old girl in 90210.

Intent-based Search Impact

Yahoo's Mindset was a great tool that no longer exists. It categorized searches by intent. "Ford Mustang reviews" is research. "Ford Mustang 2008 dealer" is shopping.

Local search tends to include more shopping queries. You must have an address on your site if it is local. But even that's intent based. "Las Vegas hotels" isn't a local search because you probably aren't in Las Vegas. However, "New York pizza" implies that you are in New York.

Universal Search Impact

[Ed: Universal is Google's product. Blended is the generic term.]

When universal came in, Google went from 130 points in the algo to over 200. Bruce doesn't think that we've yet seen the impact of that yet. They're still working on getting words out of video and out of audio.

If you don't have engagement objects, your site is going to drop like a rock.

Overall, ranking is dead. Behavioral, universal and intent are all going to bias the search results in a way that makes ranking worthless. What you're looking for is TRAFFIC. Your only measurement for success is from analytics. If you're not doing analytics, you're missing out. It's going to be hard to defend that you're doing SEO on the basis of doing rankings.

If you're in a behavioral group, use their words on your pages. Design your site for what it is. If it's a shopping site, make it look like a shopping site -- include bulleted lists and shorter pages.

Experiment with and understand how to include engagement objects: images, video, maps, audio, etc.

Q&A

How important are backlinks from syndicated content?

Bruce: We've had many cases where you're syndicating to a site that's higher authority than you and they'll end up outranking you if you're not careful. I don't think it'll help you get ranked.

What is too many links on a page?

Mark: The guidelines say less than a hundred but can you do more? Don't over do it.

Jill: Do what's right for usability. Don't put so many that it's confusing and dilutes your PageRank. However, you do want to link to your important pages. Don't design for search engines. There's no magic number.

[The asker wants a particular number and everyone declines to give him one. Heh.]

How do you balance research and shopping in one site?

Bruce: The architecture tends to reflect one or the other. You can add user-generated content. If you want both, make two pages. Don't try to make one page serve two masters.

Bill: It's a matter of keywords taking you to different places. The pages would look like shopping or research.

Bruce: It's about tie breakers. There's no such thing as a minor part of your Web site when you're in the top 10.

How does one machine do competitive analysis?

Jill: You can turn off personalized search. Firefox has add-ons that can do it.

Bruce: There are third-party products that will bias you across multiple sites. That's really the challenge.

Ash: On my blog, I have links to places where you can opt out of customized ads.

In our experience, Google leans more toward quantity over relevancy. How big of a percentage would you say it's the other way?

Bill: He thinks it's a large percentage. He says that quality -- not just contextually relevant -- links are the real goal. That's the most important part. He totally disagrees that quantity is even a factor.

Mark: He reminds everyone to link to the RIGHT page with the RIGHT keyword.

Does Google treat the top three positions as pretty much equal?

Bruce: You're talking about Wikipedia, Wikipedia and Wikipedia?

Jill: I think it's the authority of sites and the competitiveness of the phrase. If you're looking to buy something, Wikipedia isn't going to show up.

Mark: There's a discussion on Webmaster World about this.

Bill: To get to the number one spot, it's just about having a higher score. No one is going to build a page that looks like Wikipedia because it looks like crap but it's highly functional. It's hard to beat something like that because it's a page that works with lots and lots of relevant links. It depends on what you're looking at. If you're trying to buy a digital camera, it's not going to be Wikipedia that you're going to go to.

Is embedding video to your site just including YouTube videos or hosted?

Bruce: It's hosted. It's got to be yours and it's got to be tied in thematically.

Bill: He agrees with Bruce. If you're embedding YouTube, you're just giving them a backlink. Put it on your own site.

Vertical feeder sites are getting discounted. How do you save them?

Ash: You really need good backlinks. Your content has to be terrific. You need an element of engagement.

IP targeting: How much is that playing in? How do you target that?

Bruce: That's intent based search. It sounds like they're looking at that as a shopping query instead of a research query and so behave in a common way. You can't try to be research for a shopping query.

Bill: It's an even worse position internationally. I was in Switzerland and trying to find snow tires for my daughter in Connecticut. I couldn't do it. You MUST have a local IP and a local TLD if you want to show up for geo-targeting.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/11/08 at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization

November 7, 2008

SMX East 2008 Give It Up: White Hat Edition

One month ago, SMX East held it's Give It Up session -- this time with a new twist. All the secrets revealed by the panelists were tips considered to fall into the white hat category of search engine-accepted search engine optimization techniques. As with all Give It Up sessions, the tips and tricks revealed were under a blogging embargo for the following month. Today we finally get to share with our readers. Enjoy!

Moderator Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land, introduces our speakers: Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service; Kimberly Krause Berg, Usability Consultant/Owner, UsabilityEffect.com; Kate Morris, Search Engine Marketing Manager, RateGenius; Tyler Shears, Online Marketing Manager, Databanq Media; Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts; Rob Kerry, Head of Search, Ayima Search Marketing; and Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive.

Shari Thurow's tip is something she does herself. She's going to compare the searcher's intent to the engine's intent. Remember that you're designing for people who use search engines, so understand how and why someone is searching, why they're using those keywords and why they're in that order. You should also understand the same concepts as they apply to search engines.

The Search Engine's Goal

The first thing she does is search. She gets keywords from keyword research tools, user interviews and tests (you need direct contact with actual users). She considers her keyword research findings with Web analytics data to predict how the engines will rank her optimized content. The tabs at the top of search (news, video, blogs and books) are the different places for which you might want to optimize. If a Wikipedia result shows up for the keyword, that tells her that the search is an informational type search.

When people use the commercial search engines, they usually have the following intentions:

• Go to a specific site
• Want info about a topic (60-80 percent of searches)
• Want to do something

A plural is an indicator to the search engine that the searcher is looking for information. Look to the search results for the type of information the user is looking for. Remember this about search listings:

• The Title tag is first, the Meta tag is second and the URL is next. For informational searches the snippet is very important.
• Another type of search is a navigational search. People are searching to get somewhere specific. People with navigational intent rarely look past the number 1 and 2 positions.
• The point is to have realistic expectations about search engine positioning.
  • The right pages
  • The right keywords
  • The right place in search results

She's looking in the search results to get her information.

Michael Gray is going to talk about how to drive traffic with your Flickr photo stream.

Take pictures that people want to see:

• Good subject, good quality: This is the kind of image that people want to make their wallpaper.
• Dull subject, good quality: An example is a picture of daisies that's taken from an interesting angle.
• Good subject, bad quality: No matter how blurry your picture of big foot is people will want to see it.
• Dull subject, bad quality: Don't take these pictures.

Use keyword-rich, unique titles:

• Instead of "DSFC001234.JPG", name the image with keywords. Try adding the month or the year to make the picture unique from all the others.
• Consider the amount of pictures that are coming up for that title and narrow it down by adding more descriptive keywords to avoid duplication.

Increase internal links with groups:

• Titles of pictures will be your internal linking text.
• Find relevant groups to submit to.
• Submit to multiple groups.
• If there isn't already a group for a certain subject, start one!

Increase Flickr views with ratings and comments:

• Ratings and comments help your internal ranking.
  • There's a group called Score Me! That you enter a photo for review and you score five in return. There's also a Score You! group where you add comments. Follow the rules of the group.
  • Submit only your best photos.
  • Have a thick skin -- some of the criticism can be harsh.

Use tags:

• Use relevant tags.
• Include the name, state, city or location in the tag.
• Use multiple words - there is no right way. Michael likes to make two-word phrases, like "Las Vegas", one tag because "Las" doesn't mean anything by itself. Other people do them individually.

Consider creative commons:

• Creative commons lets others re-use your pictures, as long as they link to your picture and give you credit.
• Consider commercial re-use.
• Take pictures bloggers want to use.

Bringing it all together:

• Try to submit pictures that are high quality or that people want to see.
• Don't add links to every picture.
• Only add links to pictures that have traffic, ratings or comments.
• Add links to deep pages that enhance and add value.
• Eventually you will drive traffic from multiple sources, like other sites, image search and even Wikipedia.

Tools to help with Flickr:

• Picasa: import, crop, edit pictures
• Flickr bulk uploader: uploads, renames, tags, put photos into sets and groups
• Picnik: online photo editor
• WordPress

Kate Morris is going to talk about developing links from the inside out.

Tip 1: Hire a student

What level?

• Undergraduate
  • Cheaper
  • Willing to do anything
  • Moldable
• Graduates

.Edu links are the golden egg of this technique. Links from student home pages and links from organizations can be gained from the student (ask nice!). You can ask them to post about what they are working on. Because it is a student account, it's not as "juicy" as other .edu links, but it's still a .edu.

Students are also good for:

• Research projects
• Content development
  • White papers are like school papers!
  • They're young and creative.
• Pay your interns! She says they'll work better for you.

Tip 2: Participate on Yahoo! Answers

• Niche market community building
• Links
• Tips and tricks

Tips to using Yahoo! Answers:

• Don't automate the answers. That doesn't actually answer the question. You'll be chosen as best answer more often if you actually answer the question.
• Talk to their specific situation with details.
• Add the whole URL to your site. These links are not followed but they show up in Webmaster Tools and are indexed.
• Be transparent. If you're representing your company, say that you work for that company and that they can help. She's built more business through this than any other link building she's done.>/li>
• Clean up the spam. There are tons of phishing opportunities, so the more often you report them, the more trusted you are.
• Vote and check daily. The more "best answers" you get the more points you get and the higher your level and trust will be. You can vote for yourself, too.

Other answer services include Live Search QnA and WikiAnswers.

Tip 3: Utilize your partners and affiliates for links

Got affiliates?

• Trackable URLs
• SEO URLs
• Blog posts
• When you have affiliates, build it into your contract

Got partners?

• Partner link pages
• Just ask
• Work out blog deal (swap favors!)

Up next, Tyler Shears will discuss white hat link building.

Your Web site is a business:

• Your Web site is a business and links should b e part of your business model.
• The model has various levels of link development needs.

No Links? WordPress!

• Start a WordPress blog on your domain.
• You can write more and with personality.
• A college intern is a good candidate to write your blog.

Content, Content, Content!

What is excellent content?

• Find out what the industry standards are for your niche.
• Use keyword research to target your terms that will generate the most exposure.
• Look at what people are writing about in your niche, what's working and what's not.

Badger Badger Badger... Mushroom!

• Create a directory.
• Create a listing for the top 100 businesses and email them with their listing info.
• Require the business to place a badge on your site.
• Use relevant anchor text.

What about the juicy links? There are some links that have more value, and there are many tools available to help you determine what a juicy link is.

Give free SEO advice!

• Point out some easy things.
• The benefit is that you can build a business relationship (affiliate, email marketing list, content partnership).
• If the relationship develops into something further and they choose to link back to you, the chances are the link is a lot more valuable after your SEO advice has improved their problem areas.

Kimberly Krause Berg is going to share her experience of reputation management with organic SEO through a case study.

There was an artist named Nathan DiStefano from Doylestown, PA. There is another Nathan DiStefano, also in PA, who wrote a vibrator review in Amazon. For the purpose of this story, I'm going to refer to the artist as ND1 and the Amazon reviewer as ND2. ND2 was getting the top spot in the rankings for a search of "Nathan DiStefano".

A colleague of ND1 got Nathan a Web site, but it was ranking below the reviewer. This Web site had:

• Text in images
• A boring Title tag: "Nathan DiStefano"
• Google was forced to pull the SERP description from the Meta Description tag: "Official web-site of Bucks County, Pennyslvania Artist Nathan DiStefano"
• An old domain. Kim would need to beat the aged domain
• No inbound links

Unfortunately for Kim and ND1, the colleague that had created the site wouldn't give them control of the site. Kim would have to create an entirely new site.

On the new site, Kim focused on organic SEO only:

• Added content to the new site, www.nathandistefanoart.com
• SEOed pages with Title tags, unique on-topic content, content before images and text links
• Wrote a testimonial which ranked in the number 2 spot for about two months because she promoted that page
• Expanded the bio page
• Connected with art galleries that show his art on their site
• Promoted the new URL in new business cards and brochures and all press including Philadelphia Inquirer
• Fiddled with the Title tag; put his name first; moved "original" around; added local information
• Added local information to Meta Description
• Added locality in text on home page and inside pages; local search
• Design new Web site

For months, the old domain was in the top three spots, followed by ND1's MySpace page, and then ND2. To combat ND2, Kim decided to make an Amazon account and new profile for the artist. She included reviews on art, music and local books.

In three months time, ND1's new site was in the number one and two spots in Google and the SERP description accurately portrays him as an artist. Now it shows what he actually does.

The more they focused on a clean and usable Web site, they more links they got. The number three ranking page for his name is a chamber of commerce link to his site. MySpace is now number four. Number five is Facebook, which she asked him to create as his professional networking page. The old ND1 site has moved to number 16.

In Yahoo, the results were even better. Print promo, interviews and videos were coming up in the SERPs. Yahoo SERPs show more results from related sites and the old site is no where to be seen.

Stephan Spencer is up next to present on Google power user tips.

Keyword competitiveness

• The intitle: operator shows pages that are more focused on your search term than the pages returned without that operator.
• Use the ratios to give you a sense of how competitive a keyword market is. This is an alternative to KEI. A high ratio is a good sign that not a lot of people are optimizing for the phrase.

Anchor text

• Anchor text remains a very important signal for Google and the other engines.
• Your allinanchor: ranking is an indicator of the strength of your anchor text. A low ranking indicates that you've got some work to do on improving anchor text.

Indexation

• Q more accurate number of pages on your site that are in Google's index can be obtained by appending &start=990&filter=0 to the URL of a Google result set.
• Want to see past the first 1000 results? Refine your query by extending site: into a subdirectory or by adding inrul: and a directory or file name.

Number range

• The Numrange operator can help restrict results set to a set of model numbers, product numbers, etc.
• The Numrange operator is also great for copyright year searches (for example, to find abandoned sites to acquire). Combine with intext: operator to improve signal-to-noise ratio.

Supplemental index

• Try site:www.domain.com -allinurl:www.domain.com which supposedly returns main index pages only.
• You can also use this supplemental index ratio calculator.

Filetype refinement

• The filetype: operator is great for looking for needles in haystacks.
• This operator actually matches based on the file extension in the URL.

Cache

• Cache is great for getting to subscriber-only or deleted content.
• You can get to it from the "cached" link in the listing or by using the cache: operator.
• Don't want to leave a footprint? Add &strip=1 to the end of the Google cached URL. Images won't load.
• No cached link? Use Google Translate and translate it from English to English.

Similar pages

• The related: operator will show who else folks link to in addition to the URL you specified.
• The results for this search operator are limited to a result set of 26 to 31.
• It is useful in identifying neighborhoods.

OR Operator

• Words in a search query are ANDed by default.
• Perform an OR search by including "OR" in the search term or with the vertical bar |.

Rob Kerry is going to talk about getting link love.

Buying links is frowned upon by Google. Link exchanges have little value and are time consuming. Web sites love free content almost as much as free money. Supplying data/content makes your site and authority and strengthens the brand. Providing content (that includes a link!) is a cheap alternative to buying links or paying social media gurus.

Case Study: Finance Client

• Offers free financial news stories and comparison tables to major publishers.
• Re-writes stories to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Integrates a copyright link on every story.
• XML feeds ensure that content is loaded on publishers domain, resulting in link juice.

Benefits:

• "Powered By" logos can strengthen brand and copyright links and significantly benefit SEO.
• The content publishers are choosing to link to you, so it keeps Google happy.
• You can gain links from super hubs that never sell links or exchange them.
• This technique can work in any industry.

Examples:

• Car insurance site: Offer gas price comparisons or new car news.
• Poker: Provide a feed of player stats or tournament news.
• Kitchen appliances: Offer recipes that can make use of any appliance.

Q&A

What kind of traffic can we get from Flickr?

Michael says that it depends on the industry, like travel, and that getting into groups helps.

Kim, if you've got small business, what does it take to do a project like your artist's?

She bartered her services for a piece of art!

How do we combat our own affiliates that use black hat methods?

Rob made the affiliate URLs link to another site which filters to his site. Stephan says to include a restriction on black hat methods in the terms of the agreement.

Stephan, where can we find the search parameters you shared in your presentation?

Search parameters like those in Stephan's presentation are in his ebook, which he's working on updating now. Shari says that Google Power by Chris Sherman also has great stuff. Joost De Valk has a cheat sheet you can search for by plugging in some of the parameters into the search box.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 11/ 7/08 at 1:48 PM | Comments (6)
See more entries in Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SMX East 2008

November 6, 2008

What If SEO Was Spelled TSA?

By Christopher Hart

As many of you know, I am the Director, Eastern Region Operations for Bruce Clay, Inc. Besides getting a super cool title, I do a lot of traveling. Those who travel frequently -- or those who follow me on Twitter, @chris_hart -- understand when I say that travel does not always go as planned and is not always an enjoyable process. On one of my trips, halfway between exhaustion and delirium, I thought to myself, "What if SEO was spelled TSA?"

Throughout my travels I visit many different airports, but there are a few I frequent more often than others. More than once, I've had the attendant checking me in ask who I am right after I've handed them my ID. Then they point to the sign that says it will cost me X to check a bag.

Hello? You have my information in your computer. Can't you see that I have done this a ton of times? Why are you treating me so poorly? Does my commerce not matter to you?

Just like my poor experience at the airport check in, ask yourself if your site's users are getting the same poor experience when they reach your Web site.

Users go to many sites during their travels on the Internet, so when you get a user that frequently comes back to your site, SHOW THEM SOME RESPECT! When allowed, track them so they can be identified, and say hello with a smile. Let them know you are glad they are back. Ask how their last visit was, what you can continue to provide them with, and what they looked for the last time they were on your site. If they're a first time visitor, ask how you can help them and do not assume that because they got to your site they will find what they need.

Remember SEO means optimizing your online digital business initiative for your users' experience. You want to make them happy.

When I am at the airport, what is the first thing I do? I look around to see where I need to go. Sometimes things are clearly marked or I may even remember how to get around from my last visit. But airports are always under construction, things are always moving, and there aren't always very clear labels.

Imagine how a site's users feel when they get to a site and what they were used to finding in one location has been moved to another. We all know you have spent hours in meetings arguing your views through countless PowerPoint slides in order to impress upon your boss the need for a well optimized site. But as your customer, I really don't care what's going on behind closed doors if you show me that you don't care about the poor experience forced upon me.

Just like misdirection in the airport, ask yourself if your site's users are having an easy or difficult time navigating your Web site.

Take the time to tell your users if information has been moved and where to find it. Use your newsletter to tell them, post messages on your site, properly redirect the old URL locations to the new, and use your analytics programs to find out where they are going so you can better help them get to the right locations.

There are countless parallels that I can continue to make between airports and SEO here:

1. Long lines are equal to poor server performance and slow page load times.
2. Asking the information center for help is the same as when the user goes to your search field.
3. Getting on the plane, finding a clean seat and being met with a smile are the same as when you send a thank you e-mail and follow up with a call to your users after they have made a purchase.

SEO is not restricted to just trying to generate traffic or rankings, but involves all aspects of your online business. Traffic to a site with poor usability will result in low conversions. If users get to your site and do not find what they are looking for, then user satisfaction with your site will be low and so will your conversation rates.

Posted by Guest Author on 11/ 6/08 at 7:54 AM | Comments (4)
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization

October 21, 2008

Five Unexpectedly Obvious SEO Tools

Tools are a critical part of any SEO's arsenal. Competitive research tools, keyword research tools, link analysis tools, project management tools, check server tools, rank checking tools, rep management tools, analytics tools -- I could go on. There are free tools and not-so-free tools. There are tools you use every day, tools you use every month, and tools you don't even know exist. Then there are the tools you may have forgotten were tools! Here are five unexpectedly obvious tools that are so integral to your daily activities you may have forgotten they could even be used as SEO tools.

1. Search

Okay, so you probably didn't forget about this one. Chances are that if you're reading this, search has already taken over your life. You used it to figure out where to go to lunch this afternoon. You used it to book the hotel you're staying at for PubCon. You used it to write that blog post this morning, and you're about to use it to find that hilarious clip from the Daily Show you saw last night so you can share it with your office mates. But when it comes to the job, search is an excellent tool for competitive research. It lets you know who your main competitors are and, through link commands, who is linking to them. Keyword research is also possible with search -- a functionality enhanced through search suggest features, as well.

2. Images and Multimedia

Didn't that picture at the top of this post catch your interest? Not only can images and multimedia get the attention of human users, but they can grab the attention of search engines as well. Images and multimedia are a sound way to get listings in a variety of locations. Image search and blended results will eat your pictures and videos right up and serve them back to hungry users.

3. Phone, Email and the Occasional Lunch

Rather archaic tools by today's standards, phone calls, emails and face-to-face time can go a long way in the workplace. One of the keys to successful SEO expectation management is communication. While you may prefer text messages or Twitter, your clients may be most comfortable communicating the old fashion way. Also addressed through communication is project management. Large scale projects need to be tracked through software programs or spreadsheets, but nothing can replace a meeting or team email to keep everyone up to speed on the stages of the project and how everyone's efforts are coming together.

4. Blogs

As a number of panelists at the Search and the U.S. Presidential Campaign session at SMX East said, blogging can be a powerful connection tool that provides a means of listening to customers or consumers. The community that can be developed through a blog can be a priceless and long-lasting benefit to your business. For SEOs, reading blogs is one of the main channels of staying up-to-date on the developments of the industry, or in other words, continuing your education. Plus, blogs are a solid way of updating and adding content to a site.

5. Social Media

Social media, like Twitter, allows us to ask questions of our peers, do research, get and give recommendations and more. I've watched bloggers make a call for post topics. I've helped out marketers that ask friends to visit certain pages they're testing. I've seen requests for the best tools that do this or that. There are vast amounts of community knowledge that can be leveraged through social media. It just goes to show that one of the very best tools we have at our disposal is each other!

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/21/08 at 5:11 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools

October 9, 2008

Get SEO Into All the Right Places of the Development Life Cycle

People are beginning to trickle out as we're reaching the end of the sessions. Their brains are probably stuffed to the brim. What a marathon it's been! Let's get our sprint on for this penultimate leg.

Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com, is both moderator and a speaker for this one.

What people think SEO is:

• Little tips that need to be incorporated into the project
• Code tweaks
• Something that only programmers need to worry about

These are the reasons SEOs aren't usually brought in early enough in the life of a project. The biggest misconception is that IT thinks that one conversation with SEO means your project is search engine friendly.

Great SEO programs are integrated, much like usability, findability and design efforts. SEO becomes part of the corporate DNA that causes you to build a great product. It's well integrated with IT:

• Prioritization discussions
• Release planning
• Existing workflows
• Change management systems
• Highly involved in project documentation

Typical Development Life Cycle with SEO

Project inception > requirement gathering > designing > front end development > back end development > QA testing > live on site

SEO is usually brought in during the end front-end development when it really should be involved since project inception. It needs to be considered at the beginning and end of project inception: at the beginning and end of requirement gathering, at the beginning and end of designing, at the end of front-end development, at the beginning of testing and at the beginning of the live on site stage.

It may seem like it would be more expensive to do it this way, but it's actually more expensive not to bring SEO in from the beginning because otherwise it requires more work to get up to speed and change things that have already been done in a search engine unfriendly way.

What It's Like with Full SEO Integration

Project inception:

• The business sponsors talk about the idea.
• The business sponsors reach out to SEO to get their take on SEO opportunities.
• The SEO team does research for SEO requirements. They brainstorm for potential opportunities. They look at competitor sites for their SEO strategies. They identify what people are typing into search engines related to this subject area and they identify requirements to make the new section maximize opportunities.

Scope document:

• SEO contributes to the scope document.
• Include SEO success factors in the document.
• Report the potential SEO traffic lift and the potential SEO revenue gain.

Once the project is approved and scheduled, requirements gathering starts.

Requirement gathering - meetings:

• Everyone gives their requirements.
• SEO sits as a key stakeholder in all sessions.
• SEO listens for content areas that can be leveraged for SEO and functionality being requested that may not be search engine friendly.
• SEO contributes by explaining requirements for search engine friendliness, how to take ideas further with SEO and any potential functionality being requested that may not be search friendly, how to make it search friendly and what to review in more detail during analysis.

This is where most SEO programs go wrong. Most SEOs only worry about SEO requirements, but the real money is bringing the ideas further and examining extra functionality.

Analysis and design - wireframes and design comps:

User experience and SEO meet on wireframes before they are presented to the project team.
Have a discussion when the project is about 80 percent complete.

Front-end development:

• SEO QAs HTML code for search friendliness. It's quick, easy and cheap to make search friendly HTML code tweaks here.

Back-end development:

• SEO is involved as needed.
• At this point it becomes very expensive to make changes.
• Development pro-actively reaches out to SEO for input and clarification.

Quality assurance testing:

• SEO QAs for SEO requirements and search engine friendliness.
• SEO enters bugs into the same system as IT.
• Some bugs need to be fixed pre-release and it can take months to a year to clean up a mess in the SERPs.

Project deliverables that need SEO input:

1. Scope document, project charter document
2. Product release document
3. Project plan
4. Wireframes and notations
5. Visual design mockups
6. Page specifications
7. Use cases, user stories
8. Technical specifications that are not all related functionality

Let's Get Realistic

Most SEO teams don't have this kind of time. They are leveraging other people to pull it off.

Create a champion for each team in the development life cycle:

• User experience design
• Visual designers
• Copywriters/editors
• Programmers (front-end and back-end)
• QA testers

Train the team on SEO:

• SEO won't be in every meeting or conversation.
• Engineers view SEO requirements as bells and whistles until they have the knowledge.
• When trained, development can help you execute SEO in every project.

Tips for training:

• Continuing education
• Train on the aspects of SEO each role needs to know
• Don't just list the SEO requirements - show examples
• Be cautious about using your own site as an example
• Reinforce the top three things you need to be changed

Get SEO into the project plan template:

• Basic SEO tasks are consistent with each project
• SEO reviews for additional tasks needed project by project

Incorporate SEO into existing guidelines and standards:

• All development projects abide by company standards and guidelines
• Get SEO best practices and standards into existing documentation (UED guidelines, visual design style guides, programming standards)

Create SEO knowledge centers:

• SEO portal gets answers at your finger tips , online
• Open office hours - the same time each week when team members can get answers
• Continuing SEO training to keep SEO requirements at the top of mind

This isn't happening everywhere. Bringing these things to your company will put you ahead of the competition.

Matthew Brown, Director of Search Strategy, New York Times Co., is up next.

What you're expected to bring to the table:

• Basic on-page SEO tactics
• Fundamental keyword marketing strategy

What you should bring to the table - audience development:

• Near psychic ability to interpret competitive markets or opportunities
• Good grasp of server side technology and how scripting plays a role
• Ability to conduct SEO testing on specific tactics or new strategies
• At least basic knowledge of the domaining world
• Social media and other flavors of marketing

Can it all be so simple? It needs to be distilled for others to understand.

When SEO is involved:

• Pure play SEO is a major business driver
• New site sections
• SEO traffic predictions are essential
• Specifications and documentations are typical of re-launches and layout and navigation changes
• Design and development phase
• Content creation of any sort

You're probably not going to get a site jump 85 percent growth in search traffic, but if there are basic changes and crawl barriers to eliminate, addressing those should result in double-digit growth.

Bob Tripathi, Search Marketing Strategist, Discover Financial Services, has learned that you should make the project managers the warriors to fight your case by giving them the numbers and getting them in the know. Executive buy-in is also key to getting in at the right level of the development cycle.

Q&A

Who are your best internal advocates and champions?

Bob says it's the project managers or your extended team working for you day in and out. Matthew says that if you're a resource for others, they'll start spreading the word that the SEO team is where to go for help and answers. Jessica says that UEDs are amazing advocates for the user experience but you need to get them to believe that they have two users to design for: humans and search engines. She also thinks the product or project manager is a good representative, as well as the person in charge of documentations.

Are there any tools or programs you use to stay organized throughout the life cycle of a project?

Bob uses Excel and his project management team uses Microsoft Project. Jessica uses a spreadsheet for personal use but when she's at meetings she brings whatever the team uses. Matthew suggests Basecamp because it's easy to share with others on the team.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 9/08 at 11:37 AM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SMX East 2008, Search Engine Optimization

October 8, 2008

Advanced Keyword Research Tactics

Welcome to the final day of SMX East. These sessions may be last, but they're certainly not least important. I haven't grabbed coffee yet but think this one will rock, so I'll do my best to turn my brain on.

Gordon Hotchkiss, President and CEO, Enquiro, is moderating and says he's glad the audience came this early, early morning after Search Bash. He says that the audience knows the basics of keyword research, but during this session the speakers will let us know the next steps to take.

Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance.com, says that keyword research is important because search engines are looking for clues to what Web pages are about. Keyword research is a never ending cycle. There's a graphic with brainstorming and discovery, keyword evaluation and keyword expansion all pointing to each other in a circular way. Making your Web site better will help increase traffic.

Create Keyword List Using Diverse Sources

Keyword lists from within the company:

• Review company Web site and print collateral
• Press releases
• Often too much insider jargon
• May or may not be customer's lingo

Site search box:

• Reveals keywords and expressions that visitors are actually using and looking for
• Gives insight into the number of words searchers are using
• Can follow visitor's path and see if site converts
• Useful source for long tail keywords
• Make sure you collect site search data

Intel from offline conversions:

• Phone and in-store conversions are an often-overlooked resource.

Use keyword research tools to expand your options and refine your selections. Some tools include:

• Google Keyword Tool
• WordTracker
• Trellian Keyword Discovery
• Google Insights
• Google Trends
• Hitwise
• GoodKeywords.com
• adCenter Labs Tools
• Microsoft adCenter Add In for Excel
• Nichebot
• ComScore
• SpyFu
• PPCProbe
• SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool

The Long Tail Concept and Finding New Opportunities

Long tail identification techniques:

• Keyword concatenation
• Permutations
• Alternate spellings and common misspellings
• Brand and model numbers
• Modifiers (geo terms and adjectives)
• Regional language
• Searcher behavior (navigational, informational, transactional)

Sources:

• Log files
• Site search
• Thesaurus
• Tools

Speaking to Audience Segments

Her technique is to divide and conquer:

• Different visitors have different goals.
• Targeting pages to speak to each audience segment will be more persuasive.
• Identify visitors, segment them and target pages to meet those customers' needs.
• Ways to segment include by searcher behavior and by the stage in the buying process.

If you match your keywords with your segments, you'll bring your conversions to another level.

Evaluating Keyword Performance

• Track keyword performance mercilessly.
• Use PPC as a test bed for conversions.
• Purge low performers.
• Play up successes in SEO.
• Analytics is key to evaluating performance.

Ariel Bardin, Product Management Directory, Google, works on making AdWords a better product. He will be showing us some of the tools available to mine the database of intentions by playing with them on the screen.

The first tool is Google Analytics. He's going to focus on the map overlay, which shows where traffic is coming to the site from, and the content overview section. He's going through the page to see different data that's available. He says that playing with this data will help you make sure you're maximizing your ROI.

With the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, he recommends plugging your URL in for suggested keywords. He also recommends entering text in the text area to help with categorization if it seems inaccurate. He says that they recently started showing the actual numbers for search volume and trends.

Google Insights lets you see the Web search volume for a keyword and how it breaks down among locations. You can see rising searches, including break out searches which have seen a rapid spike. This way you might be able to catch which keywords are on the rise before your competition has.

One new feature lets you look at keywords and placements together. This helps you manage keywords and placements in the same ad group to contextually target the placements you choose. You can choose placements that reach your target audience and also add keywords to contextually target your placements.

Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear, is going to talk about buzz mining and the intersection of keyword research and social media.

Social Keyword Suggestion Methods

Part of the overall marketing mix is social engagement and they try to have search influence that. If you find out what people are talking about in certain channels, then you'll be able to speak to them about what you know they're interested in. Social sites are congregation points for hundreds of millions. Hot topics define each community and influencers moderate social search. You can gain huge insights into your product.

It's about finding authoritative content and scraping it for contextual insight, then extrapolating with lateral stemming. In social communities you can see the tag cloud clearly and find out what people are talking about. You can sometimes even measure individually or on average. Advise keyword research by what people are talking about.

An example to think about as a jumping off point:

• A large candy and baking supply ecommerce site creating a blog feed.
• There is power to SEO and recurrent content.
• The blog will help to truly serve and engage customer base.
• Hiring writers, installing WordPress, planning promotion and avatars, etc., will be needed.
• It's a big investment of time and cash so there's insight needed regarding content with viral productivity.

StumbleUpon can give you tremendous insight. To get to the tag cloud, type gibberish in the search box. There's the recently hot and the most popular of all time. You can see that people at SU like chocolate and that there are featured chocolate sites, which is the authority content chosen by SU users. By looking at the sites he found a good one and plugged the URL into the Google Keyword Research tool. Keyword clusters are generated and you can begin constructing the keyword list. Do this over and over again to continue building a list.

Buzz Pocket Mining

• Socially advised keyword research
• Great for content ideas, SEO and PPC
• Yields easy to promote keywords and content
• Take note of authority users in your travels
• Create your own pages to scrape from walled gardens to gain insight regarding particular users, groups, etc.
• Exploit each tool's unique stemming features

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 8/08 at 9:06 AM | Comments (3)
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