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?

SEO and Google SideWiki

Recently, Google released a new feature called SideWiki to add to their Internet browser toolbar. The goal of SideWiki is to allow users to input comments and share information about web sites all over the Internet. When visiting a site with the Google SideWiki toolbar enabled, a small blue arrow and comment icon appear to the left of your browser window. When clicked, SideWiki expands to reveal details about the current site and include comments shared by other toolbar users who entered comments.



Why should I care about SideWiki?

SideWiki allows anyone to comment on your site. This means that people can say what ever they want about your products and services. This is important for companies who want to maintain positive PR. It's also important that companies pay attention to what their customers are saying on SideWiki. It's likely that SideWiki users are early adopter types who's opinions can sway early majority customers to buy or ignore your products.

It's unclear as to what impact SideWiki will have on search engine optimization. It's likely SEO impact will be minimal, but could provide Google's algorithm with similar keywords customers are using to describe your products and services. If someone were to comment in SideWiki; "I really like their new Widget and use it every day." it's likely the mention of products will help add relevance to search results. It's unlikely that tons of spam SideWiki entries for "widget" will have any effect.

Have you downloaded SideWiki for your browser? What are your thoughts so far?

Email Marketing and SEO

The gang over at SEOmoz put a nice video together on using email marketing and SEO together to promote your web site. This video does a great job explaining how each plays a role in attracting visitors to your site and how to keep them coming back.

Reference Extract : SEO Trust Factor

What do you think of when hearing "Reference Extract"? I'm just as confused as you. Apparently, the reference extract project is an attempt to help people find the best information on the web. Why not use search engines? As you may know, search engines (Google) favor sites with many inbound links and rank sites using an algorithm. This approach takes out some of the human element of selecting the most relevant information. A web site may not be the best possible resource for your search, but since it has many links and content it will rise to the top.

The goal of RE project is to insert the human element, in this case librarians, back into finding information. The video below helps explain the reference extract project and how it can be used to help search engines determine trust. I'm not totally clear on the status of this project, but worth exploring.

Twitter for SEO : Relevance

Lately I have been paying more attention to my inbound keywords in Google Analytics. I have noticed some strange keywords that I have not optimized for on site appearing in my keyword reports. Some of the keywords appearing are "West Virgina SEO". Since I have not mentioned or optimized for West Virginia SEO terms on my blog or web site, the only source I could draw these terms from is my @seanhecking Tweets on Twitter. The Tweets were about a trip to the WV that I took a couple weeks ago.



This could have just been a test Google was running on social media relevance, but I think it's an example of where things may be headed in search engine algorithms. We know that having links from other web sites with content around those links describing your optimized keywords is essential for top rankings. Are search engines taking it one step further and giving more weight to social profiles and the relevance of their surrounding terms to your web site?

Local Search Listing Optimization Guide

Many SEO projects start with keyword analysis, web page content writing and later inbound link campaigns. For many companies, an easy win is a local business listing in Google Maps Local search results. Local search listings are free, appear at the top or sometimes in the middle of natural organic listings depending on keywords. They also provide almost instant visibility for small businesses, medium and large companies alike. Whiles it is still important to build a long term strategy for regular organic listings, take steps early to build and optimize your local search listings.

Google now offers some insight into your local search listings with it's Local Business Center. Some great statistics are provided:

• Impressions - how many times your listings has been viewed or cued up
• Actions - where are people clicking on your listing?
• Top search queries - the terms people are using to find your listing
• Driving directions - where are people coming from before they visit your store?

A few tips for optimizing your local search listings:

• Keep your listing complete and updated
• Keep your listings consistent across all local search engines (see engines below)
  
• Gain citations through other sources (press releases, blog posts, etc.)
• Build landing pages for each store or branch location and link to those pages
  
• Include common local keywords (ex: Cleveland, Ohio Akron, OH)
  
• Include keywords in categories
• If you are not sure how to make updates, contact an SEO consultant to get help
• GetListed.org is free service to review your current footprint before making updates
  

Local Search Engines:

• Google Local Business Center
• Yahoo Local Search
• Bing Local
• AOL Local
• Yelp

What other resources or tips for improving your local search listings have you found useful? If so, please comment below.

Link-ability

When discussing the subject of inbound links as it relates to search engine optimization, many an SEO will go into a discussion about Google's PageRank, link popularity, anchor text and so on. What many experts fail to touch on is the connection between the content on your site and how likely your pages are to receive natural inbound links.

Natural inbound links are the ultimate goal for any search engine optimization campaign. Natural links offer a relevant and diverse link profile, much of what Google is looking for in how it ranks your site. Google is also looking at from where your links originate. Are they from low quality sites with little visibility or are they from high quality sites with lots of visitors? I've put together a description of what I feel makes a page gain natural links.

Link-ability: The copy, images, look-and-feel and topical subject matter of a web page that increases it's likely hood of being linked to as a valuable resource for an online audience. The ability to easily share a web page with friends and transfer knowledge by way of links.

What do you think makes a web page link-able?

Added Search Marketing Resources

To help add insight into search marketing and social media topics, I have started a resources section to help answer common questions that arise during a social media marketing or SEO campaign. The first article entry added is called "What is SEO?" The goal of this article is to clear up some of the myths around search engine optimization. In the coming months, I plan on adding more 101 type resources to this section to help marketers better understand key SEO topics and basic social media strategies.

Rand on the future of SEO

One topic that doesn't get discussed often enough, in my opinion, is the future of SEO. While doing some research, I found an interesting video interview with Rand of SEOMoz. In the video are a couple topics I would like to highlight:

• Trends to Watch: Searches on search engines vs. searches in social network sites.
• Links: Still the trump card for gaining search engine rank for traditional SEO.
  
• Google Tags: Helping webmasters with technical issues.
  

Measuring the Value of Link Building

During a link building campaign, a topic that almost always comes up is the value of link building. While folks in the search marketing community have a decent grasp of why to build links, SEO buyers and business associates sometimes struggle with the value links provide.

After some deep thought, I thought it would be helpful to illustrate the role links play in an SEO campaign. As you can see in the graphic below, each function of search engine optimization has it's role in gaining visibility.

Technical - Technical recommendations are the foundation of SEO, allowing your Web site to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Improving your site structure helps search engines and visitors find information they need more quickly.

Page Content - Without quality content on your site, visitors and search engines will fail to see value in what you have to offer. If they don't see quality content, they may visit but not come back very often.

Link Building - Links are the most effective way to gain traction in search engine results. Good content and technical fixes will only get you so far. Going from #8 for a given keyword to #3 can sometimes mean big gains in traffic. To reach those levels for competitive keywords, links are the driving factor when all else is equal.

Social Media Optimization and SEO

I found a really good article, from a Search Engine Strategies session, that helps explain the relationship of social media to SEO and other forms of online marketing. This article focuses on Social Media Optimization, or SMO for short. SMO is the process of optimizing every aspect of your website and various components to take full advantage of user interaction with your content. Below are some of the highlighted topics I found most interesting.

• Using Social Media to compliment your SEO efforts and PPC campaigns
• Optimizing your tags, titles and descriptions within social networks
• Maximizing searchable content (images, videos, link bait)
  
• Blog optimization
• The continued value of forums
• Niche social news sites

As social media marketing matures, I think we will find there are few differences between how we optimize content for social media sites and how we optimize content for the Web.

Google Semantic Search is Here

For months the SEO community has suspected that Google began using search semantics in it's algorithm. Now we have proof.

" ... we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search ..." - Official Google Blog

What does this mean for marketers?

Web Page Content - When creating SEO content for your Web site you must consider using related words, concepts and copy along with your keywords.

User Experience - While creating a good user experience is important, Google seems to be shifting it's focus back to keywords and related keywords.

Longer descriptions - Since Google seems to be focused more on the meaning of each page in it's search results, it has expanded the summary for each link. This will most likely increase the need to be listed "above the fold" in search results, since the longer descriptions will push listings 6-10 further down the results page.

Marketing New Products Through Blogs

The folks at SEOmoz have done a great job with their whiteboard Fridays. Today's discussion is on Query Deserves Freshness (QDF), a tweak to Google's algorithm that promotes results that are buzz worthy for given keywords.



"Remember the Adamo?"

What I find most compelling about today's whiteboard edition is the later half of the discussion that talks about promoting new products using the Dell Adamo campaign. This is a great example of how promoting a site through social media, using bloggers, can positively influence the search engine visibility of micro site. These are great tips for anyone looking to market new products through social media and positively influence your SEO efforts. What types of offline marketing and social media promotion are you using as part of your search engine marketing campaigns?

How Social Media Helps SEO

Over my vacation I read a very interesting book from Bill Tancer of Hitwise. His book brings up some very interesting points in regards to search engine visibility as a result of social media engagement. His book uses data to display how social media presence creates a lagging improvment in search engine visibility. I have provided a rough chart below that speaks to the "inflection point", the point at which social media activity is eclipsed by search engine activity. (please excuse my poor drawing) In his book, Bill uses the rock band Fall Out Boy as an example of how social media activity can have an effect on searches performed on Google.

Red = Social Media Activity
Blue = Search Engine Activity



Using this basic chart, you can see that the initial surge in social media activity resulting in a surge in search activity. While Social Media may not have a direct influence on improving search engine rank, it can have an indirect effect on visibility. If more people are searching and visiting your Website, then more people are likely to link to your site. If more people link to your Website, then your site will improve in search engine results.

Which comes first?

As SEOs, we often focus on what we can directly influence as a marketer. With the growth of social media, we need to expand our strategies to include social media as an early SEO tactic to gain visibility. Setting up social profiles and brand pages are often as important as building your website. If you think of social media as a promotional/link bait tool, setting up specific social media product pages with on site landing pages would make sense. While much of social media marketing is still in it's infancy, it's clear that it can be driver for all aspects of marketing success.

Your Thoughts ...

What strategies of combining social media and SEO have you had success?

At what point in an online marketing campaign do you introduce Social Media tactics?

How Not to Cross Link Your Microsite

SEOMoz has done a great job with this brief whiteboard tutorial on why its a bad idea to rely on microsites for cross linking. Companies typically use microsites to help pass link value to their main domain by way of a keyword rich anchor link. They suggest that consolidating your link value is the best method for increasing your search engine authority.

From Webmaster to SEO Specialist

The term SEO has been used to describe anyone who performs the function of search engine optimization and even those who manage and optimize paid search advertising. As the role of the SEO has evolved, the tasks and goals of search engine optimization have changed. Years ago, anyone performing search engine optimization was likely called a "webmaster". As the demand shifted from website maintenance to marketing, webmasters began taking on the role of online marketing manager. The focus here was mainly banner ads, affiliate marketing and online directory placement as well as their normal site updating duties.

Online marketing managers began to evolve into search engine marketers as search engines began to dominate the way we use the Internet. The role of an SEO then was to not only manage paid search ads, but also dig into content on the site to include key words and key phrases. Adjusting meta tags and descriptions was a main task of early SEOs. As the demands and complexity of search engine optimization began to increase, there became a need for content specialist or copy writers specific to search marketing. There was also a need for one way link building specialist as the need for inbound link popularity became more important. Meta tags and descriptions as well as two way linking partnerships began to loose their effectiveness.

As we look into the SEO crystal ball, all that is clear is change. Google specifically has raised the bar after each update and changed the game. This has only caused the search marketing industry to fragment into more specialized roles. If Google remains the dominant player, they will continue to mold the SEO industry. If Google looses it's Cuil the industry could become even more fragmented and specialized. What do you think will be the next trend in the SEO industry?

SEO Tech Blog

A colleague of mine, Craig Geis, at Rosetta writes a good technical SEO blog for keeping your website search engine friendly. He provides some great insight into what search engine spiders see when they crawl your website and how to fix errors that could prevent Google, Yahoo and others from accessing your sites content. He also has some good thoughts on usability, web analytics and general search marketing. Check out his blog for some helpful tips!

Web Analytics Advanced Segmentation

Just noticed some really cool features in my Google web analytics account this morning. The new advanced segmentation features are easy to apply by dragging and dropping groups of data to make your own reports. I hope to learn more about these features for measuring SEO in the coming weeks and post my findings.

Why SEO Tools and Plugins Rock

A few posts back I mentioned an SEO tool called Website Grader. This tool allows you to grade your website on a scale from 1-100, with 100 being the best SEO score. There has been a lot of talk about "cloud computing" and the like in the last couple years. Looking beyond the hype, cloud computing is really all about using collective knowledge to solve problems efficiently. Plugins, predefined web reports and tools help teams gain valuable knowledge. This process would otherwise take teams hours of trial and error to gather on their own. I'm very big web based helpers, they create efficiencies and gather collective knowledge from "the cloud".

What's your search engine rank eh'?

Rather than making the click across the border into Google Canada, or calling up your buddy in the UK to find out where your site ranks across the pond, you can switch search sites within the same search results using a handy Firefox global extension. I find it very useful when tracking sites or doing link research for any international search market. This tool works great with SEO for Firefox as well.

What's Your SEO Score?

A helpful tool provided by Hubspot, helps you grade you web site based on a variety of SEO factors. This tool is a great starting point for anyone looking to get a high level view of where their site ranks on all the major search engine factors.

One of the more interesting features of this tool is how it will analyze the content and grade on readability. As you can see, I need to work on my copy a bit to appeal to a broader audience.



Few tools really offer the kind of overall approach with recommendations like the WebsiteGrader. One other such tool is Trifecta offered by SEOmoz. I would recommend trying out many different tools to see what value they can provide.

Boggs on Blogs for SEO

Brulant / Rosetta SEO expert Chris Boggs comments on blog URL and domain strategy for search engine optimization. Enjoy!

Flash RIA and SEO

Adobe announced today that they will be working closely with Google and Yahoo to improve rich internet application - RIA search indexing. What this means is that rich media content developers will be able to create more engaging experiences without losing search engine visibility. This is very good news for the RIA community. The only concern I have is where the content will rank relative to content that exists on a normal "static" web site. Also, now that Flash technology will be indexed, how does that fare to technologies such as Microsoft's Silverlight RIAs?

Powerset Semantic Search

Powerset recently released a "natural language" search engine for Wikipedia. The goal of Powerset's technology is to make search more intelligent. Over the next few weeks, I will be testing out this new technology just to see how accurate the results appear compared to other search technologies.

SEO Friendly Web Design on Squidoo

Posted a new lens today on Squidoo, a user generated content site. The focus of this page is to spread the knowledge of web standards and its effect on search engine optimization - SEO. Clean code in your web design is a major factor in how the search engines view your web site from both a relevance standpoint and user experience.

SEO Benefits of Blogs - EvanCarmichael.com

Posted an article recently at EvanCarmichael.com on the benefits of blogging as it applies to Search Engine Optimization. This article provides a high-level summary of blogging, how to get started and how to leverage blogs to gain search engine visibility.

I'm a new author to EvanCarmichael.com and hope to post more articles here in the future. The site is a great resource for small to medium size business owners looking for advice directly from industry professionals.

SEO Tips : LSI Explained, take 2

I've decided to go a little deeper in the topic of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) by offering resources on the discussion as it applies to search engine optimization. I've complied a list of links to help you sort out fact from fiction. Enjoy!

http://www.seo-blog.com/latent-semantic-indexing-lsi-explained.php

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623571

http://lsi.research.telcordia.com/lsi/LSIpapers.html

SEO Tips : LSI Explained

Recently, an article on SEO and LSI from MSNBC surfaced that I feel does a fairly good job of explaining all the factors that go into gaining search engine visibility on the web. This article makes a good case for why your business should rank on Google for terms related to your products or services.

The article also does a good job of explaining a phrase called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This is where a search engine looks for terms related to the keywords people might be searching for and displays the pages that are most accurately "themed". This is often the area where many novice SEOs fall short. They tend to focus on the keywords (or meta tags, gasp!) and not page content. Writing great content that is themed for your given product or services is the best way to reach your target audience.

While these are great words of wisdom, there is a deeper issue that web site owners must address, that there is no quick or easy way to drive a site to the top of search engine results. Much of what ranks a site well in search engines takes weeks or months to develop. Being bottom line driven, many business owners will address this by using paid search advertising. In the short run, paid search is an effective strategy but expensive one. Focusing on organic search is the best way a business can gain long term visibility without spending all of their marketing budget on paid search ads.

Blog SEO - New Life to Old Blogs

After a few years of posting on this blog, I've noticed that the same topics begin to resurface over time. This can actually be to a bloggers benefit and help build their Blog SEO strategy.

By referencing past posts within the copy of your blog, a blogger can reflect on old thoughts. By linking to these older posts, you are giving the search engines fresh content, a link to relevant content and a link to content already in their index. For instance, by linking to an post from 2005 on email newsletters and blogs, I have referenced both a relevant post and brought new life to old copy. You can begin to see blogs the same way search engines see sites.

SEO Tools and Paid Search ROI

I've complied a list of helpful web based seo tools to aid in measuring your paid search effectiveness and search engine ranking. Use these at your own risk.

ROI Calculator (Yahoo) - Use this tool to help measure your spend.

SEO Quake (Firefox) - Be careful not to overuse this one. Google tends to quit after a handful of searches. Plenty of good stats all in one on-page listing.

RankQuest Tool Bar (Firefox) - This tool can help you make improvements to your web site that can make an impact on your overall visibility.

Page Strength (a slightly different metric than Google's page rank) - This gives you a real time view of your site's web footprint based on a variety of metrics.

Attention Cleveland Web Design and SEO pros in Ohio

Do you live close to Akron or Cleveland, Ohio?

Do you love to code web pages and have a keen eye for design?

Do you enjoy ranking web sites in major search engines, or would like to learn how?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, please email me.

The company that I work for, Brulant, is looking for experienced search engine optimization pros and talented web designers in the Cleveland, Ohio or Akron area. Please email me if you have skills in the these areas and would like to learn more.