SEO : "The Man Behind the Curtain"

This week's SEOmoz whiteboard Friday talks about hiring a consultant for your SEO. One of the frustrations with buyers is the lack of transparency in strategy and tactics. This week's whiteboard Friday does a great job of explaining what to look for when you are shopping around for search engine optimization services.

While it's not wise for SEOs to give everything away before winning a contract, I feel consultants and firms should be more transparent in their approach. How is a buyer able to truly compare firms and services if they do not know the tactics involved or what's being measured. Every company or service is a little different, but a majority of SEO services performed should be similar based on the size of a client's website. Do you agree? How much information is too much?

5 Common Sense SEO Tips

When most folks start learning about SEO they are sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of information on best practices, tips, tricks and techniques out there on the web. They read everything they can get their hands on, from SEO copy writing to one way link building. Over time the picture becomes more clear and things start to make sense. What most SEO articles and resources fail to mention is that A LOT of SEO is common sense.

Below are 5 common sense tips for SEO:

1. Why would you name your website "ABCcorp.com" if you sell widgets? Why not buy a domain name "ABCWidgets.com" that includes one of your most important keywords? Unless your company is a household name like Apple or Pepsi, branding is not that important to your domain name.
   
   
2. You use file folders to keep track of important documents at work and home. A website is no different. Organize your website into a hierarchy of main folders (categories) and sub folders (categories) so people and search engines can more easily find your content.
   
   
3. If you sell widgets, why not include the term widgets in your navigation? It will help users and search engines know what deeper categories and pages mean before clicking through to the next page.
   
   
4. Does your customer want to be told how great you are and how cool your company is to work for? Maybe, if they have an hour or two to burn while stuck at the airport. Most customers want to hear what you can do to help solver their problems or make their day easier to manage. Create content that speaks to your customers needs.
   
   
5. When talking to a friend or spouse about cool products you like, do you say "try this new ABCcorp XRB-11 II Widget - Azure"? You would say, "try this new Blue Widget I found online, here's the link". Use the language your customer use to describe your products and services.
   

Traffic and SEO

When performing SEO or hiring a consultant, most online business owners are concerned with improving their rankings for specific keywords. If they don't know what keywords to target, they look to an SEO consultant to help them find the right mix of keywords to begin targeting for optimization. The hope is that improving rankings for the right keywords will result in increased traffic to specific areas of their website. Increases in website traffic means more potential sales.

Since much of the success of a website is measured on traffic and conversions, are we too focused on keyword rankings and not enough on overall site traffic? Should we consider overall site traffic as a measuring stick when performing organic search engine optimization? I have listed some thoughts below on the topic with pros and cons for each.

Cons of Measuring Traffic and Organic SEO

There are many factors to consider when measuring SEO performance with site traffic. Does your site have other external marketing that effects your overall traffic? (social media, email marketing, monthly deals, seasonality, radio, billboards) Some of these non-SEO marketing tactics can lead to natural linking, which improves SEO. Non-SEO marketing tactics also lead to brand awareness, which contributes to increased click through rates on organic search results.

Pros of Measuring Traffic and Organic SEO

By using traffic to measure performance, is the shift in focus now to generating traffic through viral tactics? Viral tactics tend to have a greater immediate impact on gains in traffic than do other more long term SEO tactics. If we are too focused on moving keyword rankings, we lose sight of the ultimate goal of bringing in new visitors.

More Thoughts on the Subject

• Measuring SEO Traffic Success from Search Engine Watch
• Measuring SEO Success from Practical Ecommerce
• Measuring SEO from Yoast

Paid Links and False ROI

Found some interesting slides from SEOmoz that detail the pitfalls of buying links to improve your search engine rankings. The slides below suggest that buying links is a "quick fix" or instant gratification that can come back to haunt your site in time. It also recommends other tactics that will help you build your brand and gain natural links through SEO best practices.



One of the most interesting charts is on slide #34, the cost of paid links over time. The graphic below suggests natural links offer the best ROI of any link building tactic. Paid links will continue to cost the site owner hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a fixed result. Natural links, over time, can grow exponentially to outweigh the benefits of paid links for much lower cost.



If you are a business owner or an SEO looking to get the most exposure for your money, look to natural link building tactics. Building a user friendly website with valuable content is the best way to attract links in a natural way. Search engines will love you and your site for it.

What natural link building tactics have you used to gain traction in search engines?

Where did my PageRank Go?!

This week I stumbled upon an interesting forum thread on Google Webmaster Central. It appears that Google Webmaster Tools has removed the PageRank metric from their site reports. In the post, a Google employee provides details on why PageRank was removed from the tool:

We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here:

http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--crawling--indexing---ranking#pagerank

Time for some sleuthing. It has been known for some time in the SEO world that PageRank is simply a helpful indication of a website's authority, but not the entire picture. The point above reinforces the idea that you should not focus on metrics like PageRank when looking for linking opportunities or your website's search engine rankings. It's important to keep the "big picture" in mind when building your site. Creating good content that people would link to naturally is the ultimate goal.

Is your company consumed with the PageRank on it's website? What metrics do you use to help measure success?

Twitter and the Hype Cycle

In early 2009, there was a lot of hype around micro blogging and platforms such as Twitter. The research group, Gartner, has produced a detailed report on where micro blogging falls in the hype cycle.

Technologies tend to follow a cycle of adoption and Twitter is no different. While everyone in the media has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, many users have signed up only to leave their new accounts tweet-less. With a large number of people turned off by the technology, the hard core tweeters are still in full force. It's this core group that will see Twitter through the "trough".

Now you will probably hear less about tweets and Twitter. This doesn't mean that it is going away. Many other companies are looking into ways to take advantage of micro-blogging and build upon what Twitter started. Who knows, there may be another micro-blogging solution that will remove Twitter from it's throne.

What is Google Wave anyway?

With all the hype recently, I thought it would be good to get the word out about what Google Wave actually does and how it is helpful. Below is a simple video that helps explain Google Wave in plain English.

(thanks to cmilburndesign)