SEO Tools

October 6, 2008

SEM for Small Businesses

As much as I love New York, this Cali girl needs her warm weather. Thankfully, for the first time today I'm not freezing cold in this room. Little blogger fingers do much better when not afflicted with the early stages of frostbite.

This session is sponsored by SEMPO and our moderator is Greg Hartnett, Best of the Web. He's going to start the presentations even though one of the speakers is apparently stuck in cross-town traffic. Half the room nods in understanding.

SEMPO is a great resource for Internet marketers with lots of free stuff, online courses and webinars available. If you haven't already, you should check it out.

Lauren Vaccarello, LVLogic, will be presenting on the cheap, free and easy tools available to small businesses. Small businesses don't always have the resources to pay for the new tools coming out. But, they're faster and more flexible than large businesses.

Competitive research is the backbone to every site. Find out what your competition is doing well and what they're failing on. There's no reason to start from scratch when you can learn the flaws and strengths and build from that.

Compete.com has a competitive research tool, but it can get expensive if you're doing a lot of queries. SpyFu.com is a low-cost alternative at about $13 a day. A free option is the SEObook Firefox Extension. You'll find out how many links there are and get an idea of what's needed to reach the top of the rankings for those tools. SEODigger is another free tool that shows the sites ranking for keywords. Xenu gives you you're Alexa ranking, backlinks and ranking pages.

Now that you've got the competitive research done, it's time for keyword research. Wordze is a great tool at about $40 a month and will give you keyword information. A free alternative is Keyword Discovery has a free and paid version. It gives you the volume of search terms.

For backlink tools, SEOmoz Backlink Analysis, at about $50 a month, will give you lots of info. But for a free tool, try Comment Hunt. It will let you know how to get some comment links. Tattler will let you scrape backlinks. Similarly, Link Harvester will tell you the age of backlinks and will give you an idea of who to contact.

For project management, try Solo SEO if you're the only one in your business. This tool shows you the top subpages of a site you're looking at getting a link from. Basecamp is a great tool for multiple people working on a project.

Reputation management is critical because you don't want to start after it's too late. TrackUR, for $18 a month, will let you know what people are saying about your company name, product names, C-level names, etc. Keotag will give you search results for a variety of sources for free. Monitor This lets you subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds to monitor your brand name.

Her key takeaways are to: take advantage of all the low cost resources out there; take advantage of your competitors' mistakes; stay organized; and monitor your reputation.

Avi Wilensky, promediacorp, starts with a picture of a juicy burger on the screen. He's going to do this presentation case study style, using the company Pocket Change as an example. Pocket Change is a luxury lifestyle newsletter and blog covering NYC and LA. They wanted to increase subscribers, page views, branding and new advertisers.

Promediacorp came up with a big idea for going about this. They decided to come up with the most expensive burger ever created and sell it at a New York restaurant. After a while, a few patrons blogged about the "Richard Nouveau Burger" they saw on the menu. Other bloggers noticed the $175 burger on the Menupages. These initial bloggers began the buzz. Pocket Change ran the official story on their Web site and in the weekly newsletter. It included a video they produced for less than $5,000.

Soon, larger NYC blogs picked up the story from the Pocket Change blog and newsletter. Previous bloggers' posts reinforced the story's validity and links and traffic was coming from all over the Web. The story went mainstream as it was picked up by CBS and other news stations. When it got picked up by Yahoo.com, they got tens of thousands of unique page views. The burger story was even featured on the Colbert Show.

Results:

• Record number of traffic and ads served.
• Hundreds of natural backlinks to Pocket Change from high authority sites
• 5,000 references of "Richard Nouveau Burger" on Google.
• Built brand in local market, blogosphere and mainstream media
• Press relationships for future releases
• Increased visibility to new advertisers

Go to http://promediacorp.com/burger.ppt to download his Power Point presentation.

Q&A

Do affiliate links have any value on raising you on organic search rankings?

Greg says that they are valuable because people are directly getting to the site. It's a dampened effect but there's still value. Nofollow links are the same way. He says that as long as they're not going through a third party, there's still an effect.

You obviously don't want to burn the budget on competitive research. What would you suggest for a balance of budget spend on a project?

Lauren says that after the initial research is done, the resources should go to building links and great content. Just because you're a small local business doesn't mean that you can't come up with a great idea, as illustrated by the burger story. Avi says that you have to keep trying because for every burger story there are many stories that didn't go big. There's no set balance, but leverage your resources.

How do we stay on top of the changes that Google makes to the algorithm?

Lauren explains that it's always going to be changing. She doubts even Larry and Sergey know all 200 parts of the algorithm, and there's no way to keep up with every single change. That's the horrible and the great thing about SEO. There's no way to be ahead of the curve, but in general, the only way that Google will know you exist is through links. As much as Google changes the algorithm, there's no way they're going to stop giving value to links. Greg says that his best advice is not to let it be obvious if you're buying or selling links.

For small business folks busy running a business, do you have any tips for how to develop content?

Greg recommends starting a blog and outsourcing it. Freelance writers are a good way to do it. Avi says that good content is all around you. A good example is when he posted a picture of the first outdoor paid public bathroom in NYC that was quickly picked up by larger sites. Lauren says that pictures are golden. People like pictures and people don't see it as commercial so they're eager to link to it.

How does Google view the paid directories?

Greg says that it all comes down to whether Google feels those directories exhibit editorial integrity. That's the difference between a link farm and a worthwhile directory. Are they rejecting sites or are they accepting every site that pays? When you go to the site, how does it feel to you? Does it smell like a link farm? The four directories general Web directories he would recommend linking to are DMOZ, Yahoo, Best of the Web and Buisness.com. Then there are also the industry specific directories.

What do you think of links coming off of social networks, like Twitter?

Avi says that the recent change to Twitter to nofollow links in the bio section was pretty controversial, but as it stands, the Twitter links are now not passing link equity. Greg says that, despite that, a link is a link is a link. Don't worry about the nofollow attribute too much. As far as social networks, outsourcing is the best way to go about it. There are some marketers that have built up power accounts and their effort will go much farther than the efforts of a small business owner just starting up an account. You'll get a better return on your investment if you outsource.

Is there a pay for performance type of arrangement for SEO?

Avi says that they have an e-commerce client that they do this for. Three Dog Media also does this type of payment model. SEMPO has a job board that you can make this kind of request on and vendors will contact you.

As a small business SEO, I'm having trouble managing expectations.

Lauren says that education is the initial step. Explain what paid is, what organic is, what to expect and over what timeline. Setting up ways to track the effectiveness, like click to call or another phone number posted on the Web site, will help set reasonable expectations.

Should I be submitting to a directory like SuperPages?

You absolutely should if you're a brick and mortar. Make sure the data listed in Local.com, YellowPages, etc., is correct because all the directories pull from each other. Google trusts the local listings sites, so you want to be present. Localese, Axciom, InfoUSA are some of the main originating points for local listings. If there's an error in the data, go to them and correct it.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 6/08 at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in SEM Events, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, smxeast2008

August 21, 2008

Post-Click Marketing: Converting Search Engine Traffic

Whose idea what it to have just a little snack break instead of lunch? I can't work like this. And by like this I mean covered in chocolate from my delicious ice cream sandwich.

This session the moderator is Anna Maria Virzi (ClickZ) and panelists are Carrie Hill (Blizzard Internet Marketing), Laura Wilson (New England Journal of Medicine), Scott Brinker (ion interactive) and Tom Leung (Google).

Our first speaker is going to be Carrie Hill. She thought she was going to have to bribe us with alcohol to get people to this session instead of SEO secrets. The real secret is knowing that Lisa's over there liveblogging it; it's just like being there!

Qualified traffic is the key to good post-click marketing. Buyers know what they want and that's what they'll search for. Use segments to deliver language and interface on those pages that will appeal to your shoppers. Use your trigger words. Buyer use words they relate to in their queries. If they use a word in their search, you should use those words on your page in order for them to see relevance. It should show up in the SERP and on the page.

Example: Free shipping-- Apple doesn't have free shipping prominently on their page so it's easy to over look. Zappos makes it obvious that they have free shipping.

Make sure that your visitors are landing on the right page. The home page is not right for every query. If they're using a word, give them a page that's relevant to it. Give your traffic the trigger word that they're looking for. If they do land on the home page, let them segment themselves.

Carry the message through the segmented path. IF they travel down the 'free' trigger word path, repeat that message.

Remember each piece of PCM can lead to more revenue from your site. Many pieces work dependent upon each other. Remember that halfway is only halfway but every little bit helps. Use Web site optimizer, do tests, let the users design their experience through self-selection.

Laura Wilson is going to present a case study on how this worked for the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Five Key Ingredients of Their Success:
1. Know what the audience is looking for
2. Engage and Convert visitors with relevant content and offers
3. Give the visitors a reason to come back to the site: Videos, beta site, free weekly audio summary and more.
4. Deepen relationships with the audiences: newsletters and subscriptions, information about updates to the site.
5. Optimize conversions through testing

Tactics:
1. Navigation links with calls to action: both home page navigation and global navigation
2. Offers on Sign In Pages -- offers that are relevant to visitor based on the content they're trying to reach.
3. Free trial upsell on the registration confirmation page -- after registering for the newsletter, they offer them a trial to the online version of the journal.
4. Offer in authentication string message -- offers based on level of access.
5. Targeted emails -- welcome e-mail series and a "new features" e-mails. Free trial member will also be getting an email series with a countdown on time left.
6. Promotions in Weekly NEJM E-mail table of contents.
7. Banner ads throughout the site
8. A/B testing, multiple tests

Scott Brinker is discussing segmenting. That's been the big thing this conference that I've noticed.

Two Takeaways:
1. To increase conversions have more specific landing pages.

A/B testing -- for your respondents, it's still just one page. You need to understand who your respondents ARE. Some might think that one thing is more important than others. What you need is more than one landing page to reach more than one audience.

2. Self-segmentation after the click

Some keywords won't give you intent. Have two step landing pages in those cases: "Dinner" -- do you mean "hamburger" or "pasta". You'll speak differently to small businesses than enterprise level pages. Tailor your second landing page to that self-selected audience.

Don't ask them to do too much work though or they'll bounce.

Figure out which ads attract which segment. Then see how well you're converting those segments.

5 reasons that 2 clicks are better than 1:

1. Easy Engagement - makes it easy for them to move forward
2. Self Identification - we respond to self-identification cues, more accurate than forms, sets expectation
3. More focused content - contextually relevant content sells better
4. Signaling - Investment reflects commitment. "If you target me, you much think I'd be a good fit..."
5. Market research - which ads attract which segments? Which segments convert best? How do prospects think of themselves?

Last to speak is Tom Leung from Google's Website Optimizer

In the old days, you just implemented stuff and hoped for the best. Or you listened to the "HiPPO" the highest paid person in the organization. If you were a little more advanced, you'd do a before and after test but that wasn't that enlightening.

Website Optimizers allows you to test different variations of a page to see which version is most effective at achieving results.

This puts power into the visitors and they'll tell you what they like best. Sites can be a living laboratory.

[He quickly goes through how to do testing with Website Optimizer.]

The only opinions that matter are the opinions of the people who go to your site.

Don't assume, make sure that your revisions aren't going to HURT your site. You have to test with a control. Your interesting idea might not work.

Basic questions:

• Does it look legit?
• Is it intelligible with partial attention?
• Is it simple to convert?

Advanced questions:

• Is it compelling?
• Does it handle top objection elegantly?
• Does it provide all the essential information?

If you're thinking about outsourcing:

• How many experiments have you run?
• Referrals? -- screenshots and contacts
• Can you justify ROI?
• What was the average lift?
• Can they work with your IT department?
• Are they willing to tie their payment to performance? (not required)
• Do they have marketing, proj management?

Ask yourself if it really makes sense to show ads on your landing page. Tell people what you're about.

He likes the Netflix landing page: It's clean, legit, informative and not too complex.

Q&A

How do you get buy in?

Laura: We present data and do projections on what the impact could be.
Carrie: We had to do a little bit of free work to show them how to make the lift. Sometimes one test isn't enough. But once you can show them the difference that a little work does, it's not that hard to convince them to do more.
Scott: It comes down to two things: Make the argument about conversion rate. Also web site optimization is a huge task. Landing page optimization is smaller and easier.
Tom: Agrees with Scott. Don't make it a huge plan, just do the simple A/B test and show them the results and the lift. People find it hard to disagree with more conversions for the same money.

How do you use Website Optimizer on your home page?

Tom: Put the goal tags in multiple places and all those are considered conversion OR they'll do a time on page test and consider that a conversion.

How long should a test run?

Tom: Never shorter than one or two weeks. Have about a 100 conversions per combination.

Is it possible to use optimizer against a segmentation page?

Tom: I've seen people run tests where A is the regular landing page and B is the segmentation page.
Scott: It's hard to answer that without sounding like a sales pitch but yeah, that's what our tools do. It's possible to do even with just a simple test. You can at least take a first step in that direction.

[Skipping an asked and answered question and a very specific question.]

[I don't know what his questions was but he said statistically relevance about ten times. I think it involved math. Tom's answer was all complicated and technical too. I'm sorry, I can't even begin to interpret. HOWEVER: Green = high confidence, Yellow: mid level confidence, Red = low confidence loser]

How do I test on low volume keywords?

Tom: Keep it simple. Just do an A/B test. Also, change your conversion metric. Make it time on page instead, so that you can take that as a leading indicator to conversion.

Scott: There's nothing wrong with A/B testing. It works.

Carrie: Don't get sucked into the idea that a conversion is 'they bought something'. It can be moving to the next step. You're testing a path sometimes.

Tom: I'd agree about the power of A/B testing. At the end of the day, people get the best results from very small tests. Small tests make you focus. Multivariate tests can make you lose your focus.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 2:31 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Google, Pay Per Click, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, sessj2008

Fast, Free, and Easy Tools To Get You Going

Time to talk SEO tools. Jennifer Laycock will moderate this one with speakers Matt McGee (KeyRelevance), Scott Allen (Hybrid6 Studios) and Joe Abraham (SageRock). This should be fun, let's do it.

Up first is Matt McGee. He's like a cute teddy bear. I just want to take him home and place him on my coffee table or something. He's also one of the most personable speakers on the planet. Okay, I'll stop gushing now.

SEO Tools: Firefox and Friends

(Only 10 people in the audience admit to NOT using FireFox.)

• Firefox Web Browser: There are all kinds of add-ons; that's why Matt likes it. It makes it powerful.
• SEO for Firefox: When you're using Google or Yahoo, instead of just getting the plain ten listings, you get all sorts of extra data like the PageRank, domain age, how many links Yahoo reports pointing to that domain, if it has DMOZ listing, etc.
• Search Status: Exists at the bottom of your browser and a pop up comes up when you click o nit. It offers a lot of the same data as SEO for Firefox, but it provides the data as you're looking at an individual link page, not on the SERP.
• SEO Quake: Lots of people like it, but it slows down Matt's browsers.

Keyword Research Tools

• Keyword Discovery: His tool of choice for keyword research. You give it a search term and it spits back all the data that it has on that search term.
• SEO Book Tool: Many search engine optimization agencies swear by this. It provides tons and tons of data about any query you give it. You can compare daily search estimates across search engines.

Backlink Tools: Tools to help you analyze links to your site or to a competitor site.

• Yahoo Site Explorer: The ultimate backlink tool.
• Link Diagnosis: Takes the Yahoo data and rearranges it and adds to it. Will show you the links, the anchor text used, if it's a nofollow link, etc.

Link Building Tools

• Hub Finder: You give it a keyword and it spits back the top ranking sites for that keyword. It then goes out and analyzes the sites that link to those high ranking Web sites.
• Traffic Marks: It has a free and a paid version. It presents the same data as Hub Finder. Matt says the interface is a little cleaner and easier to use.

PPC Tools

• Local Keyword List: Free. You provide a zip code, radius, and a bunch of keywords. It takes the data you gave it, looks that up against a zip code database, and then spits back all the city and town names and adds them to yours.

Domain Tools

• DomainTools: Provides WHOIS info. You give it a domain and it tells you the page title, the Meta description, how many link it finds, additional data like if its listed in DMOZ, what category it's in, what the description is.

Spider Tools

• SEO Browser

Wow, that was a lot of info. Up next is Scott Allen.

Competitive Research Tools:

Compete: Collects data from ISPs and other sources and then gives you info on your competition. You can start with their free tools which let you compare traffic on different Web sites. From there, they also provide premium tools which give you really in-depth tools. Even though the best data isn't free, it's still an important site to put on your radar.

Google Trends for Websites: It's similar to some of Compete's tools but it's less in-depth. You can get what regions visitors are from, other sites they've visited, the keywords other sites' visitors have search for and derive who your competitors are.

Spyfu: Excellent PPC data for competitors. You can find data by domain or keyword. You can see what competitors are spending on PPC campaign and see ad data. Find out what keywords they are bidding on. Gives you the ability to drill down and download data for further analysis. Spyfu UK also recently launched.

Google Insights For Search: Google provides data specifically for marketing based on what people are searching for. Use it to decipher trends. Locate appropriate regional markets.

Competitious: Store data about competitors. Create matrix to compare competitor features/attributes. Pulls in RSS feed and search results. You can click and save anything that looks interesting from search or blog feeds, Setup different profiles.

Using WordPress as an SEO Tool

WordPress is one of the most popular blog platforms out there. It's really well-suited for search engine optimization, especially with a few modifications. One of the great things about WordPress is the great developmental community around it. There are tons of plug-ins around to expand its functionality. It can be used by experts or beginners.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization Benefits: Helps users create basic optimized content even with little SEO knowledge. Once setup, all you have to do is write (for best results 2-5 times a week). You can use it to build links and awareness. Great for social media marketing

Recommended WordPress Settings:

• Search Engine Friendly URLs: Go into Settings -- Permalinks -- Month and Name.
• Indexable by Search Engines: Settings -- Privacy -- Blog Visibility - I would like my blog to be visible.
• Communication with other blogsL Setting - Discussions...

Wordpress Plugins:

All in One SEO Pack: Helps you with your on-page SEO. It helps you will your Title tags. It prevents a lot of duplicate content issues on the site. It generates your Meta description tags automatically.

WordPress Related Posts: Internal Linking Plugin. It's very important to improve internal linking throughout blog. It helps expose users to other content and improves search engine rankings.

Sociable: Good social media plug-in. It makes it easy for visitors to submit your content to social media sites.

RSS Footer: RSS Feeds are published but rarely optimized with out of the box blog factor. RSS Footer adds a copyright notice and a link to your Web site.

WP Super Cache: Caching plug-in. Traffic spikes can cause server to buckle under the load. If your site is unavailable for long periods of time your rankings can suffer.

Joe Abraham is next.

Google Keyword Suggestion: Now gives you the approximate search volume. Lets you search by specific term. You can just type in a URL and see what Google thinks it's about. Do it to your own site, as well.

WordTracker: Good tool but don't go by the search volume numbers.

Microsoft adCenter Labs: Free Demographic tools. Input a URL on a list of phrases and get back predicted demographics. He mentions both the demographic predictions tool and the keyword forecast tool. Type in any URL and get the make up for who's visiting that Web site - gender, age ranges, etc.

XML Sitemaps: An XML file lists all the URLs on your Web site or all the ones that you want indexed. List relative importance of pages. Allows the engines an easy way to find pages. Does not guarantee inclusion. Google, Yahoo and MSN all support this protocol.

SitemapDoc.com: If you have under 500 pages on your site, this will generate all the code you need for an XML Sitemap. You just copy and past the code into a text document and save it as an XML file.

Google Webmaster Central: Once you have all this info created, you can submit your sitemap through Google Webmaster Central. Once verified, you gain access to some Google Data o your site like content analysis, top search queries, and Web crawl stats. Can be added to iGoogle.

You can double check your robots.txt file in Google Webmaster Tools.

CrazyEgg: Heatmapping tool. Creates different visual overlays of site with statistics. Creates a heat map, using color to indicate activity.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 12:36 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, liveblog, sessj2008

How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with Your IT Department to Get Stuff Done

Ah, the internal battle of IT and marketing. How do you get the IT folks to actually implement your brilliant vision? I have no idea but our panelists Matt Bailey (SiteLogic), Greg Boser (3 Dog Media), Sage Lewis (SageRock) and Chris "Silver" Smith (Netconcepts) think they do. Greg and Sage are last minute additions and don't have presentations. Moderator Jeff Rohrs (ExactTarget) will force them to reveal the secrets. Matt will do it at ten times the speed of light and make Star Trek jokes in the process while I fail to keep up. Hi, Matt!

Matt Bailey is up first. He's been on both sides of the fence, IT and marketing and knows the joys and pain of both.

Don't go back and start beating on your IT team without first understanding how it needs to be done and how to speak their language. IT people can smell blood in the water, if you don't understand, they'll tell you that it can't be done.

Things you need to know:
Robots.txt -- So many people get this wrong. It's the welcome mat to the site. You don't need to have a welcome mat but if it exists, it needs to be accurate. It's a very simple text file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /test

The asterisk means ANY BOT.

You can sink your entire site by writing Disallow: /

Redirects -- Change of URL
Change of Index page
There are two kinds, permanent detour and temporary detours.

If you redirect using a 302, you might not be getting all of your link juice.

Tool: WebBug -- will tell you where you have redirects and what kind they are.

Fix 302s into 301.

Inconsistent linking -- Pulls up Brookstone's site and thanks Derrick Wheeler for finding the example. Always link to the same version of every page.

Duplicate Content -- Products existing in different categories with exactly the same text. When you duplicate content, you're making the engines choose which is more important and it might not be the one that you want it to be. Getting rid of the duplicates can have immediate benefit.

Good URLs: Words are easier for USERS to understand and they consider it as measure of relevance if they see words in the URL. Do the rewrite not just for the SEO standpoint, but also for the user standpoint.

Use a Favicons for branding.

Diluted Content -- Too much content on one page. You end up scattering what the page is about.

Unclear Instructions -- [Mmm, USB Sushi] Make sure that there's enough information on your page for users to make a decision. That's a marketing problem.

RSS -- Outside of this convention, people don't know what RSS is. If you're expecting people to know what to do with it, you're missing out. Explain.

404 pages -- Do not use default RSS pages. "Error 404 page not found" isn't helpful to a user. Give them a friendly message, a way out, a search box and relevant links.

Know when it's not really IT's fault. Test your site, see if it's really marketing's problem. Try the site, test the instructions, make a good user experience.

More info at the SiteLogic Blog.

Chris "Silver" Smith is next. Like Matt, he's seen both sides of the IT/Marketing divide. He'll teach us to get in touch with our geek side. [I put on my wizard robe and hat...]

Check for problems: SEO Health Diagnostics.

Tip: Browse your Web site like a spider.
Tool: Web Developer Toolbar -- disable JavaScript, disable CSS, disable Images, etc. [http://chrispederick.com/work/]
Tool: User agent switcher -- tell sites that you're Googlebot or Slurp, etc. [Same URL]

Chris shows Coke.com through the eyes of a spider -- not a whole lot there. Just a few links and in the copyright line. This is a common issue.

Redirects that are also bad for SEO: JavaScript redirects and MetaRefresh. It's lazy coding.

Tool: Web-sniffer [websniffer.net] -- if the page redirects but also returns a 200 error, you need to fix it.

How are we today? Ongoing analytics.

Tip: Check visits referred from top 3 search engines.
Track $ conversions from SEO traffic vs other sources. If you're just getting traffic and not converting, that's not good.
Track Bot requests over time. Base it off your log files.

Watch for recurring issues!

CMS hell: Recurring CMS/Legacy issues. Check and recheck SEO factors - Titles, Metas, H1, etc. Don't assume that "once fixed, always fixed". CMS upgrades can reverse changes.

Befriend your IT colleagues:

• Befriend and collarobrate with IT
• Give credit where credit is due
• Understand that improvements can be handled iteratively. Be satisfied with babysteps towards goals.
• Follow standard IT process for prioritizing.

Be nice! Programmer's Day is September 13th!

You need to make your company recognize the value of SEO
1. make a business case for SEO -- use your competitor's success.
2. Equally important to success as user experience, legal requirements, etc.
3. Take every opportunity to educate about SEO

Once the value of SEO is recognized, it can be prioritized along with another project.

It should not take 6 months to make Title changes. If you still can't win, you need to go around them. That's only IF ALL ELSE FAILS.

• Go to another IT department
• Build a parallel system on a sub-domain if you can't get the legacy/CMS system to work. Scrape your own site and put it in a friendly version. It's not efficient from an IT standpoint but it's a patch.
• Use a proxy system.

You need to get started, that's the important thing.

Time for some thoughts from Greg and Sage:

Greg: We require IT people to be part of the process from the very beginning. They don't take the project if IT isn't on board. The thing that screws things up is that marketers go in blazing but don't have the language. Take a slidedeck and explain what is it that you need to do, why you need to do it and give them an example of why it's a problem if it's not done. Do it with the boss around so that everyone gets on the same team.

Sage: He's a big picture guy. His wife plans everything. I think this is going somewhere NSFW.... Marketers are big picture. IT thinks in steps. You need to empathize with the IT people and accept that they're good at their jobs because they're analytics. Make a plan with them that they can understand. Communicate with them the way they communicate.

Jeff: If I'm a marketer and I'm not technical, what training would you recommend to get me started? Is that even helpful having the training.

Matt: "Websites that suck" was a helpful book. MarketMotive, SEMPO, DMA all offering training classes. But the most valuable is getting a partner in the IT dept. The flip side is the IT manager who thinks he already knows everything about SEO.

Greg talks about smacking know it all IT managers upside the head with a phone book. Violence! He likes people who have code experience to be SEOs.

[It's funny, I've always thought of SEO guys as more like IT and less like marketing]

Sage: Figure out what you're using and take a class in it. If it's PHP or Microsoft, whatever. Value their position.

Q&A

What's the best platform if we're building a Web site from scratch?

Greg: Anything that's not Microsoft? Most companies work open source. PHP, MySQL. You can find something free or very cheap that's pretty easy to work with.

Matt: I would agree. Anything that's Microsoft is going to go through iterations and that's going to be hard to keep up. PHP is more scalable and you can always find a programmer to tweak it. Take the two slide decks and build your RFP: I need it to do this and this.

Chris: I don't think that marketers need to learn programming. It's useful to learn some of the basic SEO diagnostics stuff. Also thinks that PHP is the way to go. Look at how the search engines are Unix based, not Microsoft based.

IT changed the shopping cart and now sales are down. How do I find the problem and fix it?

Chris: Check the type of browser that you're getting abandonment issues on. If it's not browser based, it might be something else. Look at your log files. Call an expert on that particular shopping cart.

Greg: Don't think they won't lie about the error log files either. Because they'll cover their tracks in some cases. Ask about what an error means.

Matt: That's a great thing. If you can say 'what's this mean? Why does that happen?" You'll learn so much and it will help you.

[More troubleshooting the guy's problem ensues. Apparently the shopping cart was built in house. The panel 'ahs' knowingly.]

Greg: It is almost NEVER better to build it from scratch.

Jeff: Are there any good third-parties who can test for you?

Matt: Yeah there are. They'll hammer and find your problems in the lab. Finding them is a little tricky. He uses a state resource.

Greg: Use your employees. Send them home and make them test it, take screenshots to give back to the IT department.

Can a good CMS product fix SEO issues?

Matt: you have to define a good CMS product first. Look at it before you build it. Keep the Title and Heading separate. Insist on it.

Greg: Every good CMS system need to give Good URLs, no duplications and individual control over every on page element. They use WordPress a lot because it's customizable.

Sage: Wordpress, I'll concur is a great system. Joomla is a great system too.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 11:17 AM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Design, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, sessj2008

August 14, 2008

Bruce Clay SEO Training Info: CA, NY and Beyond!

Okay, there's lots of SEO training stuff to cover so get your pencils out and take notes, k? Let's go.

Bruce Clay UK SEO Training

As much as it pains us to have to do this, our UK SEO training scheduled for 9-11 September has been canceled. Have no fear, though, we're not going to leave our friends across the pond hanging. We're working hard right now to get a rescheduled date set up soon and we'll let you know the moment we have it. Keep your eyes on the blog or the SEO Newsletter for the latest.

Bruce Clay Australia SEO Training

Our Aussie friends still have a few more weeks to take advantage of Early Bird pricing for our Australian SEO course taking place on 21-23 October. The three day course will take attendees through our Basic and Advanced Certification training courses, give them access to Bruce Clay's SEOToolSet and provide more search engine optimization knowledge than you can shake a stick at. Those who register before 1 September can get in the door at just at A$2,750 (excluding GST). After that date, the price goes up to A$3,250.

In case you missed it, our last Australia training course was rated an average of 4.6 out of a maximum of 5 with a satisfaction rating in excess of 90 percent. You can read more about past attendees experiences on the Australia SEO training testimonials page.

If you do want to attend, we'd ask you to sign up ASAP. Our March Aussie SEO training course sold out quickly and we had to turn people away. We don't want you to be that person.

SEO Training at SMX East

Registration is now open for Bruce Clay's SEO training following SMX East on Oct. 10-11. It's a great opportunity for those on the East coast to attend, as this will be our first time offering training on the better coast. Did I say "better coast"? Surely, I didn't mean that. You East Coasters just better get ready for the Bruce Clay invasion, because it's on! ;)

The SMX East training course will include a condensed version of our standard SEOToolSet and will be taught by Bruce and Director of Eastern Operations Chris Hart. Considering you can attend both SMX and training for $2,990, that's a pretty amazing value.

If you're making travel plans, the course will be presented at The Westin New York at Times Square between 8:30am and 5:30pm. There are only 70 tickets available for this one, so grab your seat early.

And of course, if you're on the West Coast and not planning on making the trip to SMX East, you can check our training calendar to see when classes are being held here in Simi.

See, I told you there was lots of training news to discuss!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/14/08 at 3:09 PM | Comments (0)
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July 30, 2008

SEO Training: What's Your Favorite Flavor?

Next week's episode of SEM Synergy will feature a segment on search engine optimization training. Since Virginia and Susan got to square off and debate the topic on the radio show, I thought I'd give you a preview here on the blog. Mostly because I think SEO training is a pretty important topic, and also because I don't like being left out of conversations. [That's the understatement of the century. --Susan]

I think the importance of white hat SEO training is becoming really clear. As the industry evolves, we're starting to see a lot of white hat/black hat, "is X technically spamming?" type conversations popping up in blogs, forums and conferences. And if you don't know what's what, it's hard to make sense of it all and to know which tactics are approved and which you should stay away from. While blogs and forums can be a great place for information, these resources don't become truly impactful until you have a solid SEO foundation to pull from.

So what are some of the different outlets for search engine optimization training?

• Online Training: Let's be honest, most of the established SEO training courses are happening on either the West Coast or the East Coast. That's great if you live there, but not too great if you're landlocked or outside the United States. Online training gives search marketers a relatively inexpensive and flexible way to brush up on their SEO knowledge, without incurring travel costs. Students can go at their own pace and are often given downloadable materials that they can reuse, either as a refresher or to help train new people as they come in.

  One of the best examples of a great online SEO Training course is the one offered by SEMPO. They offer both basic and advanced training to help search marketers of all knowledge levels.

• Seminar Training: I think seminar training is one of the best ways to learn about search engine optimization because it allows you to take notes, do homework, interact with an instructor and put your knowledge to use while still being supervised. You get a great wealth of knowledge poured into your brain and you get to ask questions on the topics you feel running off the sides. Seminar training is especially effective when it comes with an opportunity to try out the various techniques and tools being taught in the class. The down-side to seminar training is that you have to listen to everyone else's questions and it often requires travel.

  Bruce Clay's SEO training course is a good example of seminar training. You come and learn with us, attend a lab where you can put your newly earned smarts to use, and then you back home and work your magic on your own site. If you prefer, we also offer on-site training for companies looking to train 20 or more employees.

• On-Site Training: If you can afford it, onsite SEO training is the most effective (and the most pricey) way to learn search engine optimization because you can teach your entire team in one sitting. If you have 20 SEOs, you don't have to pay travel expenses on all 20 of them. Or, if you want to really be ahead of the game, you can pull together your IT people with your marketing people with your vice presidents and get everyone involved. This is a great way to teach those executives about the importance of SEO and increase your chances at getting them to sign off on projects.
• Conferences: Conferences offer attendees to learn from experts while also establishing valuable connections that may assist them in the future. Larger conferences allow you to focus in broader topics, while the niche shows will help break down highlighted verticals.

  SES offers a stellar broad industry look, while SMX has really shown itself to be the conference of choice to master the verticals. Both provide ample networking opportunities and can introduce attendees to important people in the space.

Often the best way to learn about search engine optimization is through a combination of hands on experience and one or two of the methods listed above. If you're looking for additional info, check out Virginia's article on Search Engine Optimization Training Opportunities or tune into SEM Synergy next Wednesday at 12pm PST to hear Susan and Virginia debate the topic.

Just a reminder to our East Coast friends, if you've been eyeing Bruce Clay's SEO training class but were concerned about making the trek to the West Coast, you can catch our SEO training class in New York following SMX East. Details should be up on the SMX site shortly.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/30/08 at 5:13 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, SEOToolSet, Search Engine Optimization

July 10, 2008

SEO Training at SMX East by Bruce Clay, Inc.

I mentioned earlier this week that there was a lot of great and exciting stuff happening at Bruce Clay, Inc. [And that we're hiring. --Susan] I also mentioned that there were two more things I wanted to share but would hold off. I'm going to reveal one more item today (if you're lucky, you'll get the last one on Monday!).

I'm very excited to announce that Bruce Clay, Inc. has been chosen by SMX to be the official training sponsor of the debut SMX East show. So fun!

That's right! After SMX East, stick around for a two-day training course led by Bruce and Director of Bruce Clay East Chris Hart. Bruce and Chris will be offering up a slightly condensed version of our standard, typically three day, SEO Training course right after the show on Oct. 9-10th. If you choose to attend training on its own, the cost will be $1995. However, if you take it in conjunction with SMX East (which we HIGHLY recommend), you'll get a $200 discount from price. We should mention that taking the course will also get you a subscription to the SEOToolSet, lots of BC-branded schwag and a three-ring binder that weighs almost as much as I do filled with all the SEO education taught in the course. Act quickly as seats are limited to approximately 80 for the 2-day seminar. We hear SMX has also set aside some hotel rooms at the discounted conference price for those attending training.

It doesn't look like you can register for the BC training course just yet but I hear signs up will open shortly. Keep an eye out because it's definitely something you're going to want to take advantage of. After all the white hat/black hat debate that went down after the last SMX, I'm especially excited that we're able to provide this training opportunity. I have no doubt that SMX East is going to be a stellar show and now we'll be there to help support it and give it an even more powerful punch.

It's also a great opportunity for East Coasters to attend Bruce Clay's SEO Training program while it's in your own backyard. We've been contacted by many of our friends on the East Coast asking when Bruce would be taking his training program on the road. While we haven't invested in that RV just yet (can I drive it when we do?), with the upcoming training at SMX and Bruce Clay East finally up and running, it won't be long until you can get standard and advanced search engine optimization training on both coasts!

We'll update you with more information about Bruce Clay Inc. training at SMX East once we know more and it gets closer to the event.

Attend SMX East, stay for our training, and go back to the office armed with more SEO education than your competitors can dream of!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/10/08 at 3:51 PM | Comments (1)
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June 4, 2008

Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues

Back from lunch. Carrot cake is delicious and Vanessa Fox is now moderating the Developer's track with speakers David Golightly (Zillow), Jonathan Hochman (Hochman Consultants) and Chris Silver Smith (Netconcepts).

Vanessa says we're going to talk through the kinds of things they look for when they're going through sites and trying to locate issues. There is also a case study because case studies are delicious. Like carrot cake. Or maybe 3 mini carrot cakes. Don't judge me.

Vanessa says you have to look at the things that really matter and prioritize. You want to hit the big stuff first.

What really matters: The pages should be accessible and discoverable. You want to know whether or not you're found in the results and if users are staying on your site. Are you offering searchers something that makes users want to click through?

She's zipping through slides without ever actually stopping on one. I think she doesn't want me liveblogging. I'll be here drinking my water.

Chris Silver Smith is up to talk about basic stuff because he figured there would be a lot of newbies in the audience. He didn't get the "Advanced" memo.

Diagnosing Crawling Issues:

How Big Are You: Do a search command on your site to see how many pages are indexed in the various engines.

Query for Session Ids: [inurl:sessionid] will help you spot these in the results. The same page indexed multiple times with different session IDs can cause duplicate content.

Check the Robots.txt exclusions in Webmaster Tools. You don't want to accidentally block your site from being indexed.

If you have a redirect going on, you want to make sure the bots can hop through it. Check the headers that are returned by the server. FireFox Header Spy Extension is good for checking status codes.

Is Content Crawlable: Check in Lynx Browser like http://seebot.org. You can also use Firefox's Developer Toolbar to view your pages like a bot.

He also recommends Firefox's link counter extension. It shows you how many links are going out on a page, how many are nofollow'd, etc. Helps you analyze how much PageRank you're passing off to other sites, as compared to how much you're retaining.

Acxiom's Marketleap - Benchmarking Link Popularity: Type in your top competitors and it will tell you how many pages are linking to each competitor and the link popularity over time.

Use Google sets to identify your competitors as the search engines see it and also to see if your site is being categorized appropriately. Your competitor may not be who you think it is. You can see who Google thinks is equivalent to you.

Next up is Jonathan Hochman.

Essential Tools:

NoScript: When activated, it blocks all client side scripts like JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Silverlight. You can safely view pages with malicious code. See what pages look like to bots. See if content is accessible.

He brings up the SMX site and shows that with NoScript turned on the page doesn't render correctly. It won't affect rankings but it may affect people's impressions of the page. Only 2 percent of people surf without JavaScript turned on. It's not a high percentage, but they may be an influential percentage.

He brings up the Gillette Web site which is all in Flash. They use a JavaScript function called swfobject that switches on HTML content if Flash is off. It's good but they do it in an ugly way.

Googlebar (Not Google Toolbar): One click for Google's cached pages. Highlights search terms. You can run any Google search. Back to the Gillette site he found that the page wasn't being cached so that makes him ask why. He opens up his next tool...

Live HTTP Headers: Will expose redirects.

Optimizing Rich Internet Applications: Feed the bots something they can understand. Add (X)HTML content to pages with content generated by JavaScript, AJAX, Flash or SilverLight. (X)HTML content can be generated by server side scripts accessing the same database as the rich media application. This ensures consistency and avoids the appearance of cloaking.

Coding Options

1. Replace HTML content with rich media content by manipulating the Document Object Model. Open source solutions for Flash: SWFobject 2.0 or sIRF
2. For JavaScript/AJAX, modify DOM to replace HTML content, or use noscript tags.
3. For SilverLight, create your own search engine optimization-friendly insertion code. Better yet, nag Microsoft to provide a ready-may function.

SWFobject: Part of Google Code so it's okay to use.

Xenu Link Sleuth: A free spider that crawls a href links just like search engine bots. Generates a list of broken links and outputs a site map using each page's Title tag. Use site map to look for missing pages, bad titles and duplicate content. You can check for broken links before deployment.

FireFox Web Developer: You can disable/enable JavaScript. Report JavaScript errors. Disable CSS. Edit CSS or HTML. View alt attributes on images. Looking for missing or inaccurate Alt attributes.

Watch out for search problems with frames, iframes, Flash and SilverLight. Each object is treated as a separate thing, not as part of the host page. This may hinder external linking to deep content. Cannot add a unique title and description. Someone can navigate into a frame and there's no navigation because the menu is in a different frame. It creates orphan pages.

Up is David Golightly to talk about his experiences at Zillow. He's the case study.

Zillow's Search Interface

A front end for Zillow's powerful distributed search engine, serving a database of 80 million homes.

Goals for the interface:

• Highly configurable for different data sets (For Sales listings, Recently Sold, Most Popular, Regions...).
• Responsive to a range of user actions (Filtering, sorting, map interactions...)
• Dynamic back-button support
• Bookmarkable URLs (cross-visit state preservation)
• Offload presentation-layer processing cycles to user's machine.

Implementation: AJAX

Server provides config and initial search results as JSON text embedded in initial HTML.
Browsers builds everything - filters, map control, result list, breadcrumbs, etc -- based on server provided config using client side templating

The interface they created was very heavy and complicated JavaScript. Without JavaScript, users and bots saw nothing. No support for users without JavaScript or Flash including screen readers, text-based browsers or search engine bots. They also had really cryptic URLs.

Result as of 1/2008:

• Of 80,000,000 homes, only 200,000 were indexed in Google. Only 20 percent of search referrals did NOT contain Zillow-branded keywords.
• Of top industry keywords (real estate, homes for sale, etc), Zillow didn't rank in the top 10 pages of Google results.

They haven't rolled out their new search UI, but it was obvious what should be done.
Start by using some semantic HTML. Start with a basic, usable Web site using page refreshes, build page structure with semantic HTML. Then, use JavaScript (where available) to enhance the HTML baseline.

By doing this they would gain accessibility for non-JS-enabled user agents and decrease their page load time.

Guiding the Bots:

• Footer and site map are entry points to their search results.
• Provide a top down navigation tree
• Link each from home detail pages laterally to other
• Provide a transparent URL structure

Summary

Bots reward accessible application design with better rankings, more thorough indexing
Don't do in the browsers what you can't do on the server
Duplicating code on both browser and server is sometimes a necessary cost
SEO should work in concert with great UX
AJAX on top, not on bottom
The next generation: Microformats.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, smxseattle08

February 28, 2008

Industrial Strength SEO

Mornings at SMX go so fast. Just a keynote and one session then it's off to lunch. In this case, the session is industrial strength SEO and so we've got some industrial strength speakers Martin Laetsch (Covario, Inc.), David Roth (Yahoo!, Inc.) and Marshall D. Simmonds (The New York Times). Don't worry, moderator Detlev Johnson (Search Return) is industrial strength too. He'll keep everything in order.

We're kicking things off with Martin Laetsch. The reality is that if you've got a small site, the basics are not that hard and you can optimize it pretty easily. But for a very large site or sites, with hundreds or millions of keywords, there just aren't enough hours in the day. How often do you do an audit of your site? Once a year? Twice? Monthly?

What you did yesterday for SEO isn't sufficient today. The algo is changing, your competitors are changing, your own site is changing.

You need well defined policy and procedures. Standards and best practices should be planned. Step one should be a detailed audit of your site. You should be looking for your weak points and problems. Are there template problems? Look for major issues. Get a baseline so that you know where you've been in addition to where you need to go. Look for coding traps, spiderability. Map your keywords to content pages. It's not enough to rank for A page. You want to rank for THE RIGHT page. Audit your site semi-monthly or monthly. You should be on top of any potential problems.

Define and Deploy your standards and Best Practices:

• Create consistent processes and written standards
• Provide comprehensive training to all key shareholders
• Create communication and collaboration protocols and expectations.

If you're working on a large site you MUST have a style guide. You need to be able to hand your style guide ot an experienced designer and have them know exactly what it means to do SEO in your organization.

Collect and share your best practices with the whole team.

Ensure continunous improvement. SEO doesn't stop. Do page level audits. Use tools and technology to keep up. On a very large site, you CAN NOT do it by hand. You need to use tools. Be able to pull out the points and say 'fix it'.

Searchers only give you three seconds to decide if you're the right choice for them. Make sure they're landing where they need to. You'll have to have analytics for this.

Define and Deploy a Tool Framework for Analytics Management Reporting

You need to prove that what you're doing is worthwhile and you have no way to do that unless you're measuring and reporting your progress. You need to report at least once a month. Make it macro level and tell them what it's doing right.

Monitor pages ranking for specific keywords
Create a monthly to do list of pages to be audited for optimization
Workflow management focusing on the highest value keywords and pages first.

David Roth is our next speaker. I've seen his presentation at Pubcon. It was pretty darn good but he's taken out all the Van Halen jokes. (so he says.) I encourage you to check out that link for more information on how big sites do their SEO.

Search is still the best way to get new customers. They use Lifetime Value to determine the value of optimization. They determine what a customer is worth across the life time of their conversion.

They just launched Yahoo! Buzz and the SEO team at Yahoo gets access to that as well as pairing with yahoo search on certain tools.

Yahoo is a very decentralized company. His team works on getting the training, education, best practices and standards implemented. The actual work is done elsewhere. (This goes back to making sure your standards and practices are exceptionally well-defined.)

[Commentary: Overall, I think people need to realize that big sites are going to be doing a lot of very basic SEO. They need to do it really really well and build it into the bones of the sites but at its heart, they rarely have the bandwidth or need to do the more high-level stuff.]

Measuring Success -- they use an SEO scorecard internally to track how successful they are. They built an index based on the same methodology as the predictive model and track it over time. They refine it as necessary. Dashboards are helpful for giving an at a glance view of where you are and how your doing against your self and your competitors over time.

If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

The companies that do really well with SEO have it built into the culture. You need to get everyone to believe in it, believe in the value of it. That's really the ideal spot.

Marshall Simmonds is going to tell us about SEO at the NYT. Hee! Detlev called him MDS. We're going with that. Ooooh! MDS's team is responsible for removing the login for the NYT. I love you, MDS!

There's actually a lot more to this than just the NYT really. NYT has a huge number of sites that require SEO. And every site requires something different. There's no SEO out of the box solution. Everyone should be able to optimize a title tag and move the company name to the end, that's easy. But there's not SEO 101, then 202.

Oh my god, MDS, slow down! He mentions everything from SEO to Social Media to branding as concerns. Seriously. EVERYTHING.

For the NYT, they had some things they needed to do:
*Get the SEO Basics down
*Template optimization
*Pull down registration wall (PREACH IT!)
*Expose archives
*Monthly network-wide communication -- Tell people about successes. Build momentum and get buy in.

NYT's growth because of these small changes has been very good. He doesn't agree that you need to audit every month but you do have to do it regularly and you have to put checklists in front of people so that they understand their roles and their part in the process. Know what your IT department is doing. They're trying to be more efficient but it can screw up SEO as well. Make sure writers and content creators know SEO and can create for it.

He goes through several case studies for ToysRUs, TVGuide, Time Inc Interactive. I'll skip it because he's going really fast and it's not really relevant.

[Commentary: It's all well and good to say that you need to build company awareness but how about something concrete about HOW you do that?]

Find one person in each department that can be your evangelist. Make it their responsibility to build enthusiasm.

What to Avoid:

*Walling off content
*Under-communicating Success
*Not checking in with IT/Production/Design/Ad Sales
*Meta Keywords Tag -- automate it if you can. Just be done with it
*Implementing the changes-- know who is doing the actual optimization and talk to them the whole way through, not just the project managers but the actual people.
*Excessive expectations: timeframes, growth -- It takes a long time. Build in that expectation.
*Lack of editorial oversight: If you're automating the Title or Meta Description tag, stop.

For tracking, give information back but give it back in a way that makes sense to the level you're speaking to. Give a high level as well as the ability to dig down.

The search "life cycle" is always changing within a company. Your search/promotion strategy is going to be messed up. Plan for it. Lastly, tracking.

Aw, he finished with a picture of babies! Hi, babies!

Q&A

What are your suggestions for coming in after the site is built?

MDS: Identify the quick wins first, open up the site and start building into the DNA and training.

Martin: I agree with that completely. Auditing and reporting, getting things in front of the right people to get buy in. Use the carrot and the stick. Show them who is doing well and who need things done.

David: The only thing I would add is that most Web sites is that companies have IT/Web developers. You should be converting them

Detlev: Be the benevolent dictator and get them to buy in.

Good backlinks and terrible inter-linking. How do you fix it?

No one really seems to have a direct answer. David says site maps are good, they do a lot of internal linking as well. [I suggest siloing--we've got lots of articles on it, go check them out.]

[Much pushing of getting analytics. Do it. Do it now. I'm serious.]

Solutions mentioned:
Omniture
WebTrends
Organic search insight -- designed for big sites, extremely expensive

When you have millions of pages, do you go for flat or deep architecture?

[Have I mentioned our siloing series? It's really good.]

MDS: NYT site architecture is automated. They use Teragram(?).

Detlev: Think about how you want to distribute your linking in a pyramid.

MDS: We always say no more than three and if you say that to IT they'll throw things at you but it's not really necessary.

Martin: The engines WILL penalize you for deep directory structures. They look at how far down it is and they'll say this isn't important. Think about what's easier for users. Shallower is better.

Marshall, what are the top technical issues you face with wireframes and CSS, etc?

MDS: Excessive JavaScript. We had to do a triage. Where would we have the biggest effect? Movies got picked first. We've consolidated the templates.

Martin: The problem isn't technical it's that the agencies are designing things based on looks not on search. Flash is fantastic but you can't have an entire page in it. If you want Titles, they've got to be H1s, not an image.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/28/08 at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
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February 12, 2008

6 Reasons Why Your Awesome Site Isn’t Indexed

One of the first things we do when a potential client approaches us with their tales of search engine ranking woe is to see how many pages they have indexed in the search engine. Let’s face it; if the search engines aren’t even indexing your site, rankings are the least of your concerns.

Typically, when we say “search engine”, we’re most concerned with Google, and a really easy way to see how big Google thinks you are is to do a quick site: query. This will give you a list of all the pages Google has indexed on your site and will clue you in to your indexing ratio (the number of pages Google has indexed in relation to the number of pages you actually have). Often when we do this test with new clients we’ll find that Google isn’t indexing their site at all due to some common search engine optimization mistakes.

Here are some of our favorites:

1. You’ve disallowed the spiders in your robots.txt: This will always be my most favorite reason for why sites are not indexed simply because it’s a classic search engine optimization mistake. If you’ve set your robots.txt to disallow the search engines from entering your site, you can’t complain when they follow your command. Go check out your robots.txt file and make sure you’re allowing the spiders into your site. If you’re finding that your site has 0 pages indexed, do yourself a favor and go check out that robots.txt file. If it looks like the one below, you have a problem:

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /

2. Your server is too slow: Google’s not going to directly penalize you for running on the slowest server ever, but it may occur indirectly. If Googlebot notices that your site is having a hard time keeping up with their request for information, they’re going to hand it a cookie (the chocolate chip kind) and some juice and let it rest while they go spend time with someone else. This means they’re not going to get through your entire site before they stop crawling pages, which in turn means fewer pages for you in the index. You can’t fault Google. They don’t want to be responsible for crashing your site. So instead, they’ll just go on their merry Google way, leaving your site still standing but not fully spidered. They’ll pick up the rest of your subject’s information over at your competitors.
3. They think you’re a spammer: If Google has decided that you’re engaging in some bad behavior and are trying to deceive them or their users, they’re not going to index your Web site. And if you’re spamming and spending your days getting some color on that white hat of yours, you’re probably aware of what you’re doing. So stop it. Fix up your site and submit a reinclusion request to Google. They’ll take a look and if they decide you’ve pulled a Todd Friesen they’ll let you back into the index and start indexing your site again.

   There’s another side to this. If you’re having trouble getting the domain you just bought 3 months ago to rank, it could be that you’re feeling the wrath of someone else’s penalty. Take a spin through the Wayback Machine and discover what your site looked like before you took control over it. If it was touting the non-friendly variety of PPC, you may be in for a hard time.

4. Bad Navigation: Is your navigation designed in all Flash? Does it consist of 90 percent broken links? Yeah? Well, then the spiders probably aren’t going to be able to access it, let alone index it. Way to go, genius.
5. Spider Traps Galore: Spider traps come in many different flavors and varieties. It could be that your JavaScript is taking up the first 2,000 lines of code, that you require cookies or some other user dependant action for entrance, that you’re sporting some seriously crazy dynamic URLs, that your home page is redirecting 7 times before finally hitting something, etc. All of these things are huge roadblocks for a hungry spider trying to get to your content. Remove them and give the search engines easy access. Otherwise, start putting your dollars back into advertising in your Sunday circular again because that Web site isn’t going to do you a hell of a lot of good.
6. Site's down/Too many 500 errors: If the search engines keep trying to visit your site to no avail, eventually they may stop trying. They don’t want to index a site that isn’t going to load when users trying to access it. Returning these sites makes Google look like Yahoo’s confused cousin. Make sure your Web site is free of hosting issues and sits on a fast server. If you want to run a quick diagnostic on your site, I’d recommend the Check Server tool located on our free SEO tools page. We have lots of great stuff on that page, but the Check Server will help you identify most of the indexing obstacles your site may be facing.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/12/08 at 4:31 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in SEO, SEO Tools, SEOToolSet, Search Engine Optimization

February 7, 2008

Charity Contest, Microsoft’s SEO Program & More PageRank Talk

Hi. No, I haven’t vanished. I’ve just been in SEO training for the past two days. I’m wicked smart now. Here’s what’s been happening while you were missing me and I was hoarding training’s chocolate chip cookies.

Countdown: 4 Days Left!

As our totally sexy SEO Contest countdown in the blog sidebar has already alerted you, there are just four days left for you to get in your site submissions for our SEO Charity contest, the only contest that will send you to SES NY and through our SEOToolSet and Advanced Certification Course for free. For free!

If you want to get in on the fun, we’ll need you to pair up a nonprofit and tell us in 1,000 words why that site would benefit from an organic search engine optimization campaign and what you would to fix the site. Your submissions must be in my inbox no later than end of day Monday, February 11th. The winner will be revealed on the 15th. Get crackin’, kids, time is a wastin’!

Microsoft + SEOmoz = BFF4Eva?

As I mentioned, I was bunkered down in SEO training for the past two days. Imagine my surprise when I headed back into the office stumbled across this post by Dave Harry entitled: Microsoft and Rand Team up to Squash the SEO Industry. In it, Dave mentions that Microsoft has started offering SEO services. Okay, another engine offering search engine optimization services is creepy; however, what really made the little hairs on my arms stand up is when I got to the part about how if you sign up for Microsoft’s search engine optimization services you also get a free 3 month SEOmoz membership. Mmm incest.

Rand’s forced to be tightlipped on the whole scenario due to NDA restraints (otherwise I’m sure we would have received a delicious linkbait-filled entry), but my guess is that SEOmoz won’t have a hand in the actual SEO aspect and have instead just signed a partnership with Microsoft. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping. Still, definitely something to be aware of for lots of juicy and scandalous reasons.

SEOmoz issues aside, you have to wonder if it’s smart for Microsoft to be encroaching on the SEO space and why they’re doing it. Let’s be realistic here. Google is offering a similar program, right? If you had to choose who to trust your search engine optimization campaign to, would you pick Google or Microsoft? If the choice of who to do your SEO was your new Boxer puppy or Microsoft, you still probably wouldn’t pick the boys from Redmond, right? Microsoft has plenty of other things to be focusing on and strengthening right now, trying to add an SEO component probably isn’t smart. Plus, it freaks people out because we don’t really know what they’re offering. Is it basic search engine optimization advice? Is it more of a paid placement program? Is it going to only include MSN-friendly tips? We have no idea.

PageRank is Not Meaningless

Tamar Weinberg is over at Search Engine Roundtable crying that PageRank means nothing. I heart my BFF, but I’m going to have to majorly disagree here.

As I commented over at Search Engine Roundtable, PageRank doesn’t mean “nothing”, in fact, it means a lot. It’s Toolbar PageRank that means nothing, and there is a huge, huge difference between the amount of juice flowing through your site and the amount of green pixie dust in your Google Toolbar. People should stop getting them confused.

Real PageRank matters. I’m not saying you should obsess over it, but it’s definitely something to be aware of when optimizing your search engine optimization campaign. PageRank is Google’s automated way of figuring out which pages are most important on the Web. Search engine optimization is about making your pages the most relevant on the Web. See how they kind of go hand in hand? It’s important that site owners take advantage of all their available PageRank by implementing search engine optimization techniques like siloing. You want to create a hierarchical site architecture that passes juice to the most important pages on your site. This will help focus your internal linking and allow these relevant pages to rank higher and attract more visitors.

It’s unfortunate that the idea of PageRank has evolved into some sort of advertising metric, because the real concept is so much more than that.

Microsoft launches Smart Web Ads

Has anyone else noticed all the sweet Microsoft/advertising related stories popping up lately? The latest one reveals that Microsoft is touting some awesome new ad options like demographic targeting, placing ads around subject themes not keywords, and using speech recognition software to create video transcripts and better match ads. Um, hi, Google called and they’d like for you to stop kicking their ass.

Seriously, people, Microsoft is taking names with all their new ventures. If they end up buying Yahoo, dropping the crappy MSN index and introducing the Yahoo audience to adCenter that could be one profitable venture. AdCenter would finally get the traffic and eyeballs it seems to deserve.

Fun Finds

Bill Slawski tells us that Microsoft may start reranking search results based upon your calendar.

Ask.com launched BigNews, a lovely Google News/Digg hybrid. Is it pretty? Yup. Will I use it? Probably never.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/ 7/08 at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in SEO, SEO Tools, SEOToolSet, Search Engine Optimization

August 7, 2007

Google Hack: Finding Supplemental Results

Guest Entry by Mike Terry, SEO Analyst for Bruce Clay, Inc.

Like everyone else in the SEO community, we’ve been scrambling to deal with the recent blow of having supplemental results unlabeled and intermixed with the regular search results. We believe we’ve found a solution.

Even before Google stopped labeling supplemental results, it was useful to automate the process of finding and viewing them. If you had a very large site, it was nice not having to wade through several--or several dozen--SERPs just to find the supplemental pages. To that end, a small collection of obscure search command lines had been gathered by the community to filter out primary index entries and leave only pure, unadulterated supplemental results. The most popular of these was:

site:domain.com *** -asdfgh

… or variations which essentially did the same thing, such as:

site:domain.com *** -view

As we reported last month, however, this supplemental search results command line was disabled by Google. It’s fun to note that in the comments at that post just a month ago, folks were basically saying, “So they took away an undocumented command. You can still find supplemental results with a regular search. What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that it was a portent. Soon all traces of supplemental results would be expunged from Google’s interface.

Aside from above, other syntaxes that once worked, but have since been purged include:

site:domain.com ~s
site:domain.com/&
site:domain.com * -asdf

With our old tools broken, we set to work finding alternatives. It didn’t take long. We hacked away, and eventually BC SEO Analyst Darren Slatten hit upon the magic incantation. Let’s build it up step-by-step (Note: Client www.finemoments.com used in examples by permission.):

1. Primary and Supplemental results mixed:

site:finemoments.com/boybabybirthannouncements/ (39 results)

2. Primary results only:

site:finemoments.com/boybabybirthannouncements/* (3 results)

3. Supplemental results only:

-site:finemoments.com/boybabybirthannouncements/* +site:finemoments.com/boybabybirthannouncements/ (36 results)

For the last, you’ll probably have to click on the link to show omitted results.

Item 3 does what we want. What it lacks in brevity it makes up for in workingness. It contains a “plus” (+) command and a “minus” (-) command. (The plus is technically superfluous; it’s just there for labeling.)

The plus command in 3 retrieves all documents prefixed by the specified URL fragment, including primary and supplemental content. The minus command in 3 retrieves all documents in the primary index, but doesn’t check the supplemental. This is crucially different from the behavior shown when combining some other special search commands and operators with the site: command.

After retrieving both sets, the plus set is filtered by comparison to the minus set and we’re left with only supplemental results.

Incidentally, if you try to use 2 above to just view the primary results, but Google finds “too few” primary results, it will show you a couple supplemental results. I haven’t verified how much is “too few”. It’s probably one of 0, 1, or 2, but I’ll leave finding the exact number as an exercise for the reader. If you suspect you have very few primary results, you can of course compare the results of 2’s command to the supplemental results (3’s command) and see if there are any matches. If so, you know 2’s results are not “legitimate”.

Here at Bruce Clay, we’re not one-trick ponies. We’ve developed other methods for identifying supplemental entries and mutually verified the results with each other. Unfortunately, we’re afraid Google will block these command lines, which forces us to hold in reserve some of our better techniques. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. After all, we must keep some secrets, mustn’t we?

Posted by Guest Author on 08/ 7/07 at 11:49 AM | Comments (5)
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June 18, 2007

Search Engine Optimization Is NOT About Useless Rankings

Let’s be honest here; I’m pretty talented, huh?

I’ve got Susan wrapped around my finger, I make older men swoon, I’m good at getting a chuckle and I’m seriously awesome at getting this blog to rank for terms Bruce is 100 percent not interested in. Have you searched for “weekend update”, “Friday recap”, or “the lisa” lately? Bruce is starting to think I was sent from a competitor looking to undermine all of his search engine optimization rankings. (I wasn’t; I promise.) [Look, I can't fire you this week. I'm sorry. We have work to do. Maybe next week. Now quit baiting me. --Susan] -- What if I kick you? In the face.

As fun as these little Easter eggs are for my ego, they’re not exactly useful to the site’s search engine optimization goals. I’m pretty sure Bruce is not jumping up and down over our number one Google ranking for Friday Recap. Just a hunch.

As a blogger, I like to think I’m pretty valuable to this company; however, as a search marketer, I’m first to admit that I kinda suck. You should NOT try to be like me. As Matt Webb intelligently discussed over at SEO Honolulu, you don’t want pointless number one keyword rankings. Your rankings should be somewhat deliberate.

Your protection against useless rankings is keyword research and focused content. Before you launch that site, that pay per click campaign or even your corporate blog, you should know which terms are important to your business. What are users searching for when researching similar services? Where would they naturally put your business? Whatever terms they’re using are the ones you want to be targeting as well. And don’t just assume you know your audience is typing into their search box, you don’t. It takes keyword research to find out.

Once you know what your site’s important terms are, you have to actually start using them. Your site content should be written to reinforce the theme of your site and to describe your services to users. Typically, this makes it really easy to work your keywords in to tell the engines and users what you’re all about, so take advantage of it. If your site is about soccer apparel, don’t start talking about puppies and ponies. Only we’re allowed to do that. We think it makes us “cute”.

The left-field rankings may be good for a chuckle, but they’re not helping you to bring qualified traffic into your site. I’m willing to bet searchers querying [weekend update] are looking for Saturday Night Live footage. They’re not waiting with bated breath to hear what Google did this weekend. As Bruce oh-so-cleverly jokes, they probably can’t even spell SEO. *cue rimshot* Those are wasted clicks. [If you're here because you were looking for SNL, we're sorry. How about a free SEO newsletter subscription to make up for it? --Susan] - Hee!

There’s sometimes a belief in the search engine optimization community that he who gets the most visitors to his site wins. These people are retarded. Optimization isn’t about duping people into visiting your site; it’s about increasing visibility, qualified traffic, and conversions. It’s not about seeing how many oddball terms you can rank for.

Over at his blog, Matt states:

“You can chase whatever keywords and phrases you like, but at the end of the day it’s all about those conversions”.

He couldn’t be more right.

The fact that we rank for Friday Recap may be amusing to me on a personal level, but it doesn’t help Bruce Clay come any closer to reaching our goals. And it doesn’t help those looking for service in search engine optimization find us any better. It’s our other rankings, the ones our Search Engine Optimization Analysts work for and keep track of, that help potential clients find us and prevents Bruce from nailing my tangent-inclined self to the wall.

It’s simple, really. If you’re not targeting the right keywords your audience is never going to find you. If you want to know what terms your Web site should be targeting, take a look at your logs and see what terms converting users typed in to find you. Examining your company from their eyes will give you a better insight into their conversion path and highlight the terms most important to your site. (But don't just stop there--if you're not ranking for something relevant that people are searching for that won't show up in your logs. Spy on your competitors too.) Once you know what terms you should be ranking for, you can work towards achieving them.

A side note: We like ponies.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/18/07 at 5:49 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization

June 13, 2007

Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training Hits the UK

Bruce Clay’s SEO training course has officially taken over London in our effort to deliver top notch best practice search engine optimization training to UK search marketers. The UK training class will be in session until Friday, then its back to the States for Bruce to relive the whole thing here in California. I hope he’s mastered sleeping on planes, trains and automobiles.

Everyone wave to our fearless leader. [Hi Bruce! We miss you. I have shoes on.]

Bruce Clay Europe’s own Rory De Niro and Marie Howell are both attending this week’s UK SEO training and have assured me that though while some attendees are experiencing a mild “brain ache” from information overload, their heads haven’t completely exploded yet; they’re just a tad swollen. That’s good to hear because there are still two days of SEO training left and this ain’t no bodge job! UK search marketers are going to be stuffed to the brim with search engine optimization methodologies, tips, tricks and best practices.

UK SEO training is being held at the Radisson Edwardian Marlborough Hotel, which I hear comes complete with a three-course buffet lunch and all the desserts and chocolates you can handle. I want chocolate!

The UK is just Bruce’s first stop on this summer’s international tour of search engine optimization training. Bruce will be back in the States for California training June 26-28, and then he’s off to Cape Town Sandton, Johannesburg for South African SEO training on 9-11 July, before Australian SEO training hits Sydney on 6-8 August.

We’re very excited to be able to offer opportunities for SEO training in countries and regions where search engine optimization is just becoming a priority. Better training breeds better SEOs and I think that’s something everyone can get behind. Now if only we could get Bruce to take me along on his international sojourns. Who here thinks Lisa should be flown to South Africa and/or Australia so that she can better fill you in all the international search happenings? Hands? Please?

Fine.

To stay on top of Bruce’s touring, er, training schedule, keep your eyes on the blog or subscribe to our SEO Newsletter. As soon as new dates are set, you’ll be the first to know.

Cheers.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/13/07 at 4:19 PM | Comments (6)
See more entries in International, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, SEOToolSet, Search Engine Optimization

June 5, 2007

Better Ways

After another delicious lunch, we're back with our moderator and host Danny Sullivan for the Better Ways session in the Organic SEO track. Panelists this time around are Alex Bennert (Beyond Ink), Greg Boser (WebGuerilla), Jim Boykin (We Build Pages), Christine Churchill (Key Relevance), Todd Friesen (Range Online), Cameron Olthuis (ACS) and Aaron Wall (SEO Book).

Danny starts off by explaining why he's dressed casually today--people yesterday ragged on him for wearing a suit yesterday. Should we have casual conferences going forward, he asks? Lots of support for that one. Me included, I'd kill for a pair of shoes with one inch heels instead of three.

Danny asks who is trying to hire SEO analysts. I put my hand up. We want writers too. Please? Help?

Apparently Danny's vision of this session was 'Better ways to do boring stuff'. Then he got the pitches in and discovered there was no "better ways". (Except for Christine's. Yay, Christine.) So we're going to do a kind of SEO technique clinic instead; all Q&A. My poor, poor wrists. They promised us advanced stuff and this session should deliver. I already can sense that my fingers are going to fall off trying to keep up. I'm totally not going to get anyone's name. Sorry.

Question: Ideas or recommendations for larger clients who are concerned about rep monitoring, especially in SMO space.

Cameron: You need a lot of education, reinforce that you're going to be doing a lot of rep management and keep a close eye on it.

Aaron: Reach out to people who are speaking positive about them.

Greg: don't expect it to get any better. It's always going to take six months and hundreds of meeting to get anything done.

Alex: We had this problem with a company that wanted to start a company blog. They couldn’t get it through legal so they ended up with a sponsored blog in the space.

Question: How would you scale link-bait or back links? Tricks, tactics for links on a mass scale without having to do much? (Like PPC, set up the campaign and check it once.)

Aaron: Find the non-commercial related links. Spend a couple thousand on premier content then run ads on Google for that.

Christine: We used to give out little awards. They have longevity. Linkbait is often short. Try to look at something that's going to have

Todd: We have a lot of interns that just kinda do what they're told (so long as they're told to do it). Have them do directory submissions. Just buy links--we think of it like a media placement. Another thing that we do is widget building. When the HTML is imbedded there's a rotating link.

Jim: We do it the no pain, no gain way. Write to people as a human. You need to offer them something of value. Prove you're human and offer them something of value.

Alex: You can build it into part of the business. Matching service. Every new provider, they get an incentive if they provide a link back.

Cameron: Empower a brand evangelist. Give them the resources and let them do the linkbait and viral stuff.

Danny: You can file a suit that something's been stolen from you and then put it on digg. Alex: We have a client that's doing that. Their entire PR is set aside for the lawsuit. (Danny's joking. I hope.)

Question: does anyone have a way of logging into a lot of social networking groups very quickly?

Cameron: I don't know of any. If something's worth doing, it's worth taking the time.

(The panelists are a little confused by the question. They think he wants to know how to get friends on the social networks. A little explanation clears up that no, he just wants to log in.)

Christine: Sounds like someone needs to create a tool for it.

Todd: Use roboform.

Danny: Session manager with Firefox. (Aaron says that it's built in now.)

Question: How about a keyword research tool that actually works?

Todd: Have you seen Microsoft's new keyword research tool? It's pretty good. (AN: I've heard the same thing, by the way.)

Greg: Why do you think they suck?

Christine: You need to look at the sources of that data; for example, Wordtracker uses meta search engines and they're starting to look at it from ISPs. She says that it's not the hard number that you need to know, it's the relative number that is what's important.

Alex: If you see furniture is 10x greater than kid's furniture, the number might not be right but the relationship probably is. (Other panelists agree.) The real data is your referral data.

Danny polls to see who uses which keyword research tools; I think everyone's lying because the number of hands that went up are super low.

Question: Linkbait: In the beginning you put an icon and a link to digg. Now there are a million. Are there any good ways to consolidate or any research that says how much is too much?

Cameron: He prefers not to do it at all. If it gets submitted too often, you could be banned or buried. No more than 2-3 if you do use them and use the ones relevant to your user base.

Question: How do you explain to a corporate client the value of unrelated links from unrelated sites?

Cameron: They do tend to end up being relevant. The people who pick it up and link back to it and blog about are the ones who are relevant and interested.

Todd: It's going to spread through your group of interests so it'll go from one person who is interested to another person who is interested. If you're using link networks, that's different.

Christine: You should have a balance. You want a variety of sources. Press releases, directories, social media, professional organizations, etc.

Greg: Link baiting and social media is about stuff for general support not for keyword relevance really. You have no control how people link to you. You still have to go out and get focused targeted links.

Cameron: You can influence it by coming up with proper titles and URLs but you don't have control.

Question: How many targeted links would you go after a month?

Aaron: Depends on your site's size and it's relevant to the field.

Greg: -agrees with Aaron- You want to make it look natural. What's your site like, what's the level of trust. Know what your site can stand.

Jim: it's not a sheer numbers game, it's a quality game. If you get a backlink from someone's subpage and that page has a 1000 pages linking to it, that's better than someone's link page which has no links in.

Todd: -backs up Greg and tells a story from his bad boy days-

Question: How do you deal with cultural differences like editorial styles aren't compatible or designers who don't want to compromise?

Todd: It's about education. You need to explain to a client how search engines work, why you have to talk about certain things in a way that's going to help. Make it as simple and low maintenance and low impact as possible. What you're dealing with is really a resource issue. You need to make it simple for them.

Greg: If they give you grief, I just fire them. There's always someone in the space who will listen. Lawyers ruin everything.

Alex: danny once wrote an article that I refer to a lot. Any good designer makes sure they're cross browser compatible and the bots are just another browser.

Christine: You're always going to have clients who won't listen no matter how much you tell them. Sometimes you just have to wait for them to learn it the hard way. Make sure they know what's going to happen but if they won't listen, then they won't. If you can show them good numbers, that helps.

Todd: We have a client everything's in Flash; they have unique URLs. They're never going to change it. So we just built the entire site again and that's what gets served with a user-agent cloak. It's not any different from the flash site but it's readable.

Greg: We use cloaking to prove our point with clients like that. We would build the site and serve it and they'd start to believe when we put it in the engines and it started to rank.

Danny references the NYTimes article that discusses how newspapers are addressing the need to write headlines for the search engines. 25% of newspaper visits are driven by search. And now we're onto the SEO is BS debate. Oh please don't go there.

Man, Danny's brilliant. Which is one of those things that Seth Godin would say wasn't useful for the readers but really? Danny's brilliant. The guy knows so much about search. Okay so we're talking about how search engines are the third browser and they're the browser that everyone uses. It's more than IE, more than Firefox. There's nothing for search engines to support in Flash, even if they could extract the text, it would just say bouncing ball.

You have to understand the difference. Danny compares it to a great visual television ad that plays on radio and it's just 30 seconds of silence. They're different media.

Advice from the audience: Never mention SEO when you're trying to convince a client to change how they write--they'll tune out. Tell them they're not writing for search engines, they're writing for the people who use search engines.

Question: How relevant or important is page freshness? (There's a specific example here but I'm skipping it.)

Jim: Google will try to feed in a fresh article or fresh page that may not last. If you have a page that's been around since 1996 and you suddenly change it, the old links may not mean as much because what they were linking to is not the same.

Todd: Google's backlink command are lying to you. I know a site had 5000 backlinks and Google said they had 8. SEO is not a one time deal, it might be a freshness issue but it could just be that that's the day that Google tweaked their algo.

Greg: Check your header dates. See when the page was last modified. It might help, might not.

Christine: I have pages I haven't touched for 8 years that are still ranking.

Danny mentions another NYTimes article, summarized by Google Blogoscoped. Google Keeps Tweaking It's Search Engine is the headline. You can look it up.

Question: Any tips for optimizing Google Base stuff?

Todd: We do feed work but we don't talk about it at conferences.

Danny: To my knowledge, they're taking more and more databases. If you have database driven information, they'll take it. I don't think they're subbing out organic for base it's that they're crawling base itself. It seems like they're not internally certain which area they want to go. Go ahead and try base. There's going to be Google Real Estate or Google Classified down the line.

Question: Something about MLS distribution in Google Base, people scraping the MLS

Greg: There's never a level playing field.

Todd: These spaces are spammy and you don't take a sword to a gunfight.

Danny pulls up a help page for Real Estate in Google Base. Mentions universal search and how it's affecting the way the search results pages on Google appear. For an example he pulls up a search on [Madonna]-- the SERP is her music discography link, wikipedia, wikipedia, Google News, more organic listings, a Google Local result... New example [New York Dental Schools] SERP: Google Local replaces the first three listings.

[I have a dream speech] SERP: Four organic, then Google Video.

Goes over to Ask.com to see their new SERPS. It's incredibly slick. Very dramatic.

Danny says regarding Wikipedia: Get them one spot on the page and get them out of my way.

Use Google Local. If you're local and you're not using it, do it now.

Question: Favorite tools

Greg: We used to have this link tool called Project Mayhem but we don't use it any more. All our stuff is internal.

Todd: Favorite Firefox extension-search status. Web developer toolbar. Aaron's SEO for Firefox extension--modifies your SERPS. Xenu Link Sleuth (everyone's a big fan of this one.) -- find broken links, redirects (Christine adds that you can do a file export and you get great reports.) Sam Spade's desktop.

Cameron: Serph--it's a relationship management tool. Links into the

Jim: Top Ten Analysis Toolbar-- you can find it on we build pages.

Danny: Groowe--changes toolbars; firefox version has social media sites.

I can't feel my fingers anymore. Thank goodness we're over.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 06/ 5/07 at 3:10 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Ask, Google, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Social Media, smxseattle07

October 17, 2006

Search Headlines

Panama is Live

Yes, the rumors are true, Panama is complete. According to Barry Schwartz, invites to start using the system will begin going out next week.

Barry was one of at least six invited to Yahoo! to test the system out the new system before its public release. He gives readers some insight into what they can expect with bullet points and screenshots over at SEW.

(If you want the schwag report, you'll have to go to Cartoon Barry. More awesome messenger bags for Barry. Life is so unfair.)

Sexy Writers

One of my favorite things about Kim Krause (despite her obvious awesomeness) is her ability to time and time again equate blogging with being sexy. It's an argument few would be able to make, or at least make with a straight face.

In the spirit of Kim's post, I thought perhaps I'd share some of my favorite sexy writers. Of course there's Kim herself, Rand (fine, it's not just his writing that's sexy), Rebecca, Seth, Kathy, Barry and Jeremy, just to name a few. There are lots of sexy writers out there, people that go above and beyond just telling you what you need to know. And we thank them for that.

[And Kim, trust me, you don't want to meet me. I'm far more entertaining on the blog than I am in person. Ask Susan, she'll tell you.] [Lisa will be at ad:tech in New York and at SES in Chicago. She'll be covering the sessions for us so keep an eye out. --Susan] -- Did I get voted out of the office again?

MSN's LinkFromDomain

This new command got Susan all hot and bothered yesterday (don't deny it, Susan) and I have to admit it is pretty cool. Just as the name suggests, MSN's LinkFromDomain lets you see all the links pointing from a particular domain.

I'm immediately drawn to it because it caters to my stalker tendencies. Just type in your competitor's URL and you get an instant look at who they're linking to. Use it in tandem with the LinkDomain and you have a fun tool for locating reciprocal links. What more could a stalker-in-training need?

Actually I'll tell you. The only flaw with this command is that it doesn't tell you what page from Site A links to what page on Site B. This would be very helpful information, especially when I learn we've apparently been linking to Cute Overload. Friday Recap, perhaps?

Reminder: If you're really into linking data, Yahoo! Site's Explorer is an excellent resource.

I, er, blog

Nick Carr (you can add him to my Sexy Writers list) wrote another stellar post depicting the look of horror and pity people often receive when tell people they blog (blog, blog, blog, blog)for a living. I've been there, it's nasty and Nick does a great job illustrating how the conversation typically goes:

""So," they ask, "what do you do?"

A tremor of shame flows through you. You try to say "I am a blogger," but you can't. It lodges in your throat and won't budge. Panicked, you take refuge in circumlocution: "Well, I kind of, like, write, um, little commentaries that I, like, publish on the Internet."

I'm sweating just thinking about the last time I got into that conversation. The worst part isn't the trying to explain it; it's the blank stare you get after you've finished, like they're waiting for the punchline. [I always go for the generic 'I'm a writer.' You can actually see them mentally substitute 'waitress'. It's fun! --Susan] -- Unless they ask you what you write.

Fun Finds

Shimon Sandler explains how to use search in reputation management. Any plan of attack that involves googlebowling your competition is always a fun read.

Fifteen Ways to Improve Your Keywords

Posted by Lisa Barone on 10/17/06 at 4:28 PM | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Pay Per Click, SEO, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization

March 7, 2006

Companies Create Content-less Content

Barry (Rustybrick) over at Search Engine Roundtable has an interesting post this morning concerning ‘the latest craze in SEO’: writing content-less articles designed merely to further link building campaigns, referencing an informative thread that popped up over at Search Engine Watch last week.

Barry highlights a phone call he received recently.

“Some person calls me asking me my advice on having a company write [sic] articles for him to build up his linkage and page count. I asked him, how long have you been in business? He said about a year or so. I asked him, are you an expert on what you sell? He said, not really. I asked him, can you write about your business and products? He said, no not really, there is nothing much I can say about them. Then I told him, you can pay someone to add content to your site, but I am not sure about how beneficial it will be in the long run.”

Now, it’s common SEO knowledge that achieving link popularity is an important factor in search engine rankings. In fact, you may have even heard of our LinkMaps™ tool designed specifically to help you with analysis of your inbound links. But if you’ve spent time on our site, you know (at least according to us) it’s not the only factor. Companies should be wary of putting all their weight on a one-legged stool; one-legged stools break. In fact, they’re not really even stools. We believe in a three-legged stool, con