Search Engine Optimization Help

Displaying links to previously published related posts in the bottom of each article has numerous benefits:

(!) Dramatically increase click-through (people who are very interested in the topic are most likely to want to read more on this);

(!) Increase the crawl depth by introducing additional inter-linking;

(!) Leverage your old content (you are likely to see your older posts commented, tweeted and stumbled).

Anyway I see no reason for not doing that. So go ahead and try introducing “Related posts” to your blog now. And here are 3 ways to do that:

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is the most popular and widely used method to bring up previously published content.

It has a wide variety of options and settings; some of them include:

Set which web page elements you want to take into account when calculating relevancy. By default the tool analyzes:

• Titles;
• Bodies;
• Tags;
• Categories:

Set the match threshold: the higher the match threshold, the more restrictive, and you get less related posts overall. The default match threshold is 5. If you want to find an appropriate match threshold, take a look at some post’s related posts display and their scores. You can see what kinds of related posts are being picked up and with what kind of match scores, and determine an appropriate threshold for your site.

And of course you can customize the look and feel of the related posts block by:

• Setting the list type;
• Creating the intro;
• Showing / hiding excerpts;
• Setting the number of posts to display, etc.

2. Arkayne

Arkayne is another Wordpress plugin that can be used to interlink your older posts. Arkayne allows to link to related posts on your own blog as well as on other blogs in your chosen trusted circle (it can thus be a powerful networking tool).

I have reviewed Arkayne in much detail previously, so here are only most essential takeaways.

According to their own words, Arkayne uses an advanced algorithm to define relevancy:

Instead of relying on tags, Arkayne automatically examines every visible word on a given post. After examining every post on your site Arkayne compares every post to the others to determine how contextually relevant they are… Please note Arkayne ignores all JavaScript content, and meta tags are not included in the contextual comparison

The links settings can be customized by going to your online Arkayne account and selecting the options there “Plugin settings” page:

• Set the introductory header for the links (i.e. create an introductory phrase, like “Related posts “);
• Add nofollow attribute to all external links pasted on your pages;
• Add some additional URL parameters for tracking;
• Set the number of cross- and innerlinks.

3. Google Related Links

Google Related Links is one of the most recent Google labs projects. It is executed as the javascript widget, so it can’t be crawled by search engine bots but the post relevancy is really high.

Try it here.

*Currently, only invited users can use Related Links. To apply for an invitation, you will have to email Google stating your Gmail address, website domains and approximate pageviews per day.*

In my humble opinion, this Google gadget should be installed at least for the sake of self-education: it may help you better understand how Google might understand your blog content.

Optionally, the gadget can also suggest searches that users can run within your site to find even more related pages:

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

3 Ways to Display Related Posts in Wordpress Blog

Welcome to part one in a series of articles on the anatomy of a hands-on SEO site audit!  This was originally just going to be one article.  But then my book-length article nature came up squarely against the awareness that true site audits can be extremely complex.

And as much as everyone just loves those cute little 9 steps to blah-de-blah, we all know already that such articles are rare for me to write anyhow.  And this particular topic is one that I think comes to the top of the list as far as importance in our industry.

Fifteen College Credits

This series of articles isn’t going to be a comprehensive how-to covering every single aspect of the process, since that could easily take up an entire fully matriculated college semester.  So what I share here today, and in future follow-up articles,  should be used as a foundation – more like a check-list of tasks with enough detail along the way to be like a nice succulent rack of ribs, slathered in the best seasoning you’ve ever had.

And where I believe it will be beneficial, I’ll also offer some insights into the broader mind-set of why I go about the audit process the way I do, based on the notion that a proper process will lead to a much higher level of success in business, and in turn, personal happiness.  Because the more successful we each are, and the happier we as individuals are, the better we, as an industry will become.  Both from a human perspective and from the added respect we gain from our clients and SEO h8ers.

So once again, I invite you to go get a large cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage, kick back, and enjoy!

The Value of Hands On Audits

Everyone goes about the process of an SEO site audit differently.  Some people rely on various tools or software to do the heavy lifting. Personally, I prefer to do most everything in a hands-on approach.  I charge anywhere from $750 for a small to mid-size site, $2,000 to $3,000 or more for a complex site in a highly competitive field,  and as much as $5,000 if it’s what I consider a “mega-site” -one that’s got (or will need) tens of thousands of pages.  So I figure the client deserves the kind of attention to detail that such a method brings.

Also, when relying on software or someone else’s tool, you may actually miss some very important information, or even be led to conclusions that aren’t necessarily based on real world fact.  This can be especially true when doing the competitive analysis, though it’s just as likely if you get lost in the hype that comes with some of those tools.

You may disagree with me on that concept.  Personally, I think things like keyword density percentages, KPI scores, and competitor intelligence that comes from software (either in a downloaded install or an online service) are only as accurate as the logic that went into it, and more important to me, I’ve never once found such a “solution” that I couldn’t bust wide open as being wildly inaccurate at least some of the time when running tests against some of my biggest clients.  (Sites that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of visitors).

In any case, I’ve consistently found that my hands-on approach gets stellar results, so until someone can show me a reason to do otherwise, I’ll continue to take the path that’s worked so well for me in the past.

Audits Are Useless Without Action Plans

In every audit I perform, I provide details on my findings – what works, what doesn’t.  And I always provide action items – literally laying out the map of how to overcome issues I’ve discovered.  That’s one of the reasons I charge the fees I do for my work.  Before I had the luxury of cherry-picking my clients, I charged my fee because there was no guarantee that the client wouldn’t then turn around and find someone else who would charge a fraction of my rate to execute my plan.

And in those situations, if I give away my audit/action plan for free or on the cheap, many clients would freak out reading the last couple pages of it where I detail the costs of implementing that plan. Usually because my “free” or “low cost” audit caused them to think or reinforced their already existing belief that SEO is easy.

These days, I get the rates I do because my audits and action plans are the lion’s share of what I do.  Probably 80% of  my work comes from agencies who hire me either exclusively for this work, or for this work followed by overseeing the team that does implement (either that agencies team or their end client’s team).  It also helps that I wasn’t afraid to charge the rates I do.  I no longer live in fear mentality when it comes to that topic.  Instead, I operate based on value pricing.

A Quality Audit & Action Plan Sets Healthy Expectations

By being as detailed as I am in this, it literally opens peoples eyes to what the causes were if they were in the SERP basement.  It’s also a reality check on what the true competitive landscape consists of, which is usually something most business owners don’t have a clue about.  And it also shows how many things need to be addressed, and the complexity of some of it.

All of which puts them in the “this is more serious than we ever considered” frame of mind that’s critical to their not labeling me as either a wanna-be hack or as someone out to rip them off.  By the time we get through even a fraction of that final document, clients inevitably have a much higher level of respect for my expertise.  They’re much more open to trusting that they hired the right person.  And even if they went into this process with some ridiculously under-inflated expectation as to budgets, they’re then much more capable now of loosening those marketing purse-strings.

Not Everyone Can Afford Executing Every Recommended Action Item

The reality is that I often run into situations where clients have fixed-budget constraints.  Either because the cash-flow just isn’t there, or because their in-house number crunchers are more skilled at arguing against spending than they (usually a marketing department) are at arguing in favor of spending.

Alternately, some businesses are already in deep financial trouble and getting better results from their web presence is a last-ditch effort to salvage an otherwise failing company.  As much as this type of business owner / manager had already pinned their hopes on this process, they often learn it’s going to be impossible to do everything (you can’t take out a business loan for marketing when you’ve already lost all your investors or creditors).

Prioritizing Tasks Sometimes Saves The Day

Because of this, I will quite often assign a priority scale to each action item, with the tasks most likely to get the biggest bang for the buck getting the highest priority.  When I do this, however, I make it crystal clear, in writing, that for each task not acted upon, the results process will take that much longer, and under certain circumstances, may mean focusing on only achieving some of the desired goals at all.

Know The Situation Before You Commit

While we can’t always know when a prospective client is already beyond hope, there are some key things you can do to gauge how solvent a prospective client is or how likely they are to become that proverbial nightmare client.

For example, when first speaking with a prospect, I explain that I’m just so busy with existing work that it could be a month before I can perform the audit, and (depending on the size of the site or the depth of competition) that implementing the plan / seeing real results could take three to six months.

That dialogue is essential, because it’s the easiest way up front to find out if they’re in desperation mode already or not.  If the response you get is something like “is there any way you can do it sooner”, or “Really? That long?” or “We can’t wait that long”, or – “your rate seems too high”, my best advise to you, my industry colleagues, is to immediately ask for an explanation as to why they said that.

Couple that with a fee that is value based rather than desperation based (caving in and saying “I need this client, so I’ll charge them half my normal rate”), and the overwhelming majority of prospective clients who are already in business failure mode will show themselves.

Being Empathetic Without Being Codependent

Now just because I advocate what some might consider high rates, it’s not that I don’t empathize with such people.  In fact, most of us know what it’s like to have, at some point, been struggling in business.  So we can appreciate when someone needs a break.  And from time to time, I do discount my rates.  Yet I don’t discount them by more than 10 or 15% with a new client anymore.  Instead, if I’m in a generous mood, I may even offer to spread my payment structure out an extra payment.  I won’t, however, get lost in my compassion, because every time I have, I’ve paid the price on a stress level.

Remember – we’re not talking about pro-bono work now – which is something I do throughout the year.  Except in those situations, I will seek out the prospective client instead of offering that to someone who contacts me for help.

The Cost Of Failure To Assess

Failure to clarify such statements will, more often than not, result in your taking on a true nightmare client.  Someone who will pepper you with dozens of phone calls or email messages on a daily basis.  Or, in the worst scenario, blame you for every delay.  Even when they themselves fail to get back to you in a timely manner.  And eventually, those quite often turn into clients who start yelling and screaming that you’ve cost them thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars in lost revenue.

Some of you are nodding your heads in understanding.  You’ve been there, so you know it’s true.  Others of you may think “that wouldn’t happen to me”.

At this point I was going to get all philosophical, but instead, I’ll just say this – if you think you’re invulnerable to it, you’re probably even more vulnerable.

It’s Not Ego, It’s Good Business Sense

For every prospective client who will, from day one, appreciate, respect and value your services, there are many more who won’t.   That’s a result of human nature and the economy we now live in.

So you’re going to need to be able to filter out those who won’t value or respect or appreciate your services.  So you can get to working sooner with those who will.

And if you’re going to show up with your integrity, and your skills, in a way that could potentially help your clients make tons of money by getting them high up in the search engines and through increased conversions from site visits, you will deserve that happiness and that success.  Because you’ll have earned it.

Beyond Psychology – Where To Begin

Okay so let’s say you get it – you understand the importance of doing your best to only take on clients who appreciate the work.  Where do you go from there?  Well, the audit, of course!  Now, every audit is NOT going to be the same.  Auditing a five page web site in a very niche market is going to be a lot less complicated than if it were a site that sells products and has competitors like Amazon.  Yet the fundamentals are the same.  So let’s start with the fundamentals.

The Focused and Methodical Mind-Set

A long time ago, I was in the Military Police.  And in our training, we were taught to be focused and methodical.  Of course that was important when I was facing down a suspect with my .45 in my hand, ready to shoot ( uh, that’s a 45 caliber pistol – ask me some time about what it was like in those situations…).

Yet even though a site audit isn’t that off-the-charts life-on-the-line intense, being focused and methodical always pays off.  During an audit it helps to better ensure you’re not going to be distracted – that you’ll notice patterns more readily, and that you’ll cover more, if not all, of the bases.

Curiosity Killed The Cat But Rewards The Consultant

As someone who ended up in charge of Crime Prevention, I also learned the value of being curious.  If something you’re looking at triggers an intuitive “that’s odd” moment, stop. Right there.  Whatever it is in your mind that you recognize as triggering that feeling, lock it in your mind.  Make a note of it in writing.

Even if it turns out to be nothing, it’s better to stop and check.  And the extra act of writing it down will ensure that you don’t just blow it off or get side-tracked and forget.  Worst case that happens is you scrap that notation afterward.

Curiosity Sometimes Pays Off Big

Later in this series, when I’m talking about evaluating inbound links, I’ll share with you a crime that was being perpetrated against one of my biggest clients, for an extended period.  A crime that potentially involves serious theft of business.  And how, in my beginning of the year audit this past week, I discovered it.  All because I had one of those “that’s odd” moments and locked it into my memory.

Well, maybe I won’t reveal that exact situation, because it’s currently going through the legal process, and I have not been given permission to discuss the exact facts of this case.  At least not yet.

In any case, let’s just say that paying attention to those bumps in the audit process can sometimes pay off in crazy-wow-holy-cannoli ways.

Documenting Your Findings

In order to keep proper records of my findings, I rely on a handful of resources.  Feel free to use whatever record-keeping method and resource that best works for you.  It’s important however, to take notes and gather data in one consistent manner each time. I use:

• MS Word
• Excel
• Photoshop
• ScreenGrab for Firefox

As I’m reviewing various aspects of a site’s optimization or lack thereof, and of competitor sites and keyword lists, by having each of these open from the start, I can quickly cut and paste, build lists, take screen-captures and annotate them.

Break It Into Groups

When I perform an SEO site audit, I don’t stay on one page and record all my findings for that page.  Instead, I split out optimization elements and look at that one element across multiple points.  So for example, if I’m looking at the home page Title tag, I’ll then jump to the next page’s Title, and another after that.

If a site has sub-directories or has funnels of content, I always check the Title on at least one or two pages in each section before I make any broad assumption.

Only after I’ve recorded my findings for that one element across multiple points will I then go back and take on the next element.

No Need to Go Insanely Overboard

Now some people might think that an audit that is thorough has to involve reviewing every single optimization element on every single page of a site.  Or every single inbound link.  Or twenty competitor sites.  And this may be why some people opt to use software or web based tools to do this work.

The fact is though, even at the rates I charge just for my audits, I’m not going to review every single element on every page, or every link or every competitor.  There’s no need to do so.  Well, there’s no need that I’ve personally ever felt.  Maybe because I see patterns better than others, or I’ve just been lucky in making assumptions after seeing what I believe to be a pattern.

Yet the bottom line here is that since this is ONLY an audit, if I’ve reviewed ten page Titles across ten different pages, at least one or two in each section of the site, and I’ve noted that there are flaws in the optimization of all or most of those, then it’s a good enough indicator to me that the whole site has page Title problems.

And THAT is what I need to document.  The fact that I’ve found a consistent issue with less than ideally optimized page Titles.

Record Your Findings In Digestible Chunks

Okay – so lets say I’ve found a flawed page Title issue.  When I record that finding in my audit doc, I’ll provide a brief description, and then the URL for two or maybe three of those, but no more.  Just enough to show the client “hey – I believe this is a problem and here’s the proof”.

With things like Titles, I also like to then show examples of how I would change them, given the opportunity.

So in this situation, the entry might end up like this:

Being Specific Without Teaching SEO

Note in the example above, I don’t bother to explain how I determined that recommended page Title?  That’s because a site Audit isn’t supposed to be an advanced course in SEO.  It’s to point out problems and recommend methods of solution.

If a client is curious to know how I came to my recommendation, we’ll discuss that during the phone or in-person review of the audit, but only in broad terms.  Because I expect my clients to trust that I know what I’m talking about, not teach them my business.  That’s not why they’re hiring me.

Building Your Case, Not Giving Away The Farm

By using these methods, what I’m doing is building my case as to the fact that there are clearly flaws in the existing optimization, and that there is a clearly defined plan of action to resolve these.

And because I show enough depth, and a few actual examples, I then set the scenario for later on, where, at the end of the audit, I drop the line-item proposal on the client.  Like:

• Thorough Keyword Research – 15 hours
• Implementation of Proper Page Title Seeding across all top tier pages – 4 hours
• SEO Category title Automation (CMS Change) – 15 Hours
• Training Client in selecting proper implementation of keywords at the Category and Product Level – 4 hours
• Follow-Up Review of Client implementation – 2 hours
• After-Implementation Evaluation of Action Plan Success – 4 hours
• Etc
• Etc

Only The Beginning

Of course, this is only the start of the SEO Site Audit process that I’ve consistently used to great success for the last few years.  In Part 2, I’ll offer more insight and methods that I use in my audits, but hopefully you’ve found this a great start.   And please – let me know what you think!

Super Extra Special Bonus Revealed

Now for those of you who hadn’t followed the comment thread in my last how-to article, Taking Front End SEO to the Next Level, I need to congratulate Michel Leconte one of the geniuses behind SEO Toaster,  for having discovered the answer to that article’s “Super Extra Special Bonus SEO Technique #739” challenge.

In that article, I included a next-level method I use within the illustrations but hadn’t revealed it as far as a description in the article itself.

Michel guessed “i guess variations of the last sentence qualifying size, resolution is not simply a coincidence, each/all/this depending on nav level.”

He was referring to the fact that in a product catalog online, whenever possible, I like to include one or more sentences within the descriptive content for each category, sub-category and product, where that text is automatically inserted and uses a pre-determined keyword seeding process.  Doing this ensures that even when the client tasks a 10 year old to manually write the product descriptions, we get at least some well-written text that has the keywords in it.  And also, we vary up the writing from category to sub-category to product level as well, to reduce the likelihood of duplicate content.

So kudos to Michel!

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00.  Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com.  Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column here at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Anatomy of a Hands-on SEO Site Audit – Part 1

I’m just coming up to the end of my first year of being an In House SEO, and it was clear in the first few months how much more beneficial it was to be on the client side rather thank the agency side. I have now decided to weigh up some pro’s and con’s of being an In House SEO.

Pro’s

If like me your company only runs one website you get to dedicate 100% of your time to doing SEO on that one website. In reality I run at 80% with 20% research and catching up on industry news. I get 100% control on the strategies and paths to success.

Being the first SEO in a company and after showing them your worth you can sell the idea of building an SEO team of copywriters, link builders etc. This is, in my opinion, every In House SEO’s idea of bliss, In my position I could bring in people under my wing and really help to develop them in the online marketing world.

Also being an In House SEO does not mean I do just SEO. I, like most digitally minded people, enjoy a whole load of things around the internet. Social Media is something that I brought to my company and now we have a very solid and stable Social Media presence. Also as is the way of an SEO I can find anything on the internet, once a week I will look for negative reviews and issues that our customers have posted on forums and website.

I will try to find the customers details and get our Customer Relation team to help the customer out and turn the negative customer into a positive customer. I am also working on our Mobile strategy too as it is something of interest.

It reminds me of a quote I seen late last year Aaron Bradley’s “Flying Solo: The One-Person In-House SEO Team” post on Search Engine Land. In it he showed the “Fictional In house SEO Job description” quoted below.

SEO specialist required for growing website. Responsibilities include on-page search engine optimization, inbound link development, PPC management, making HTML changes to the main website, developing PHP scripts, writing content for two blogs, creating landing pages and developing marketing campaigns.

Some people would find this a bad point. I however like this and really enjoy the variation of my role.

Last but not least because of the very high monthly rates that some agencies can charge for their services you can usually find yourself on a very good salary package and the company you work for will still make a great saving in its marketing spend. (Its not all about the money though!)

Con’s

If you are a sole SEO in the marketing team it can be quite a challenge to bounce ideas of other members of the team. I am lucky however to work in an area of the UK with a thriving digital scene that meets up once a month for a bit of SEO networking. Twitter is also a good place to bounce ideas and find like minded individuals to share idea.

If something goes bad, your the one that has to take the blame and you are the one that has to fix it (usually ASAP). So remember everything you did, why you did it and when you did it. It will help you greatly if some keyword suddenly falls outside of the top 3 pages for no reason.

You can find some tasks very long winded on your own. Agency side I remember grabbing help from other SEO’s after all 6 heads on one long winded task is better than doing it yourself. Luckily I manage my time well and spread out the really long winded tasks that an SEO strategy can incur.

So there you go, some pro’s and con’s from an In house SEO that is well and truly converted to this way of working. I think this is definitely a “once you try it, you won’t go back to an agency” kind of career.

Shane Jones is an In House SEO working in for a leading Online Travel Agent in Manchester, England.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Pros and Cons of In-House SEO

Over the past weeks, I’ve come across a few highly valuable and inspiring articles on using Gmail filters as well Outlook rules for better productivity. This actually goes about organizing your email more effectively in order to do your job better and faster.

This prompted me to optimize my SEO process using email filtering to a achieve higher productivity. Just an hour or so of playing resulted in quite a few cool tips I am thrilled to share on SEJ:

1. Create a separate folder / label to store your weekly analytics reports

I use Google Analytics reports feature that sends me CSV traffic reports weekly. Now I have a separate folder to store all those report. I have also set them up to skip my inbox because I can now access my folder any time to find the most recent one (the latter one is optional. Some people prefer to receive the reports to the inbox and thus be reminded to go check their traffic / rankings trends).

2. Automatically star Google Alerts updates.

Like many other Internet marketers I use Google Alerts to track my brand name mentions. I now automatically star all updates coming from Google Alerts service to unstar them once I go through the updates.

3. Store client work in various folders

I have set up filters / rules for mail from my clients to get sorted into different folders. Now, once a message comes from any of my clients (From:*@clientdomainhere.com), it gets into the separate folder dedicated to this client. I can thus store and quickly access all the email correspondence from any person.

4. Send yourself reminders of upcoming tasks

I have created a separate label / folder to store the reminders. Now once I need to remember to do anything, I send an email message to myself and this task is stored in my TO-DO folder unread until I go and do that.

5. Send reminders to others

I can also automatically forward specified messages to the people I manage for them not to forget to do the task. For more detail on this one, refer to my Gmail productivity post on MUO.

6. Send an SMS to your phone once your story gets Dugg

Well, actually I haven’t seen this one in action yet because none of my posts has been dugg since the last week but I have this set up. I use BLVDstatus to update me via email once my webpages see some unexpected traffic spike. Then I use this post as the guidelines for setting up SMS alerts for those email messages.

7. Get uncluttered: filter social media updates

As much as I love my social media friends and always vote for all the stuff they share with me, the updates keep me from being productive by instant updates in my Gtalk. It is much more efficient if I access one folder daily and read all the shares and vote for them in one go.

Therefore I have created a separate label for Mixx, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc shares and now those updates skip my inbox and go straight to “Social” folder. They are marked unread there until I enter the folder, read every message, check the story shared and vote for it.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

7 Awesome Ideas to Use Gmail Filters For SEO Tasks

You may have noticed that two weeks ago Google announced a new feature for Google Reader: the ability to create/track RSS feeds for pages that don’t provide them.

There’s a lot of potential here in just about every aspect of web use – personal and professional.

Like most tools, the functionality can be used to many ends. The limits are only your own insight and creativity.

From an SEO standpoint this new feature opens up some interesting possibilities.

1) Add your core in-linking pages to detect when a link to your website is removed

Effective link building often means keeping track of the links you’ve secured – especially when you’ve invested money/resources into getting the link. Monitoring your in-linking pages manually is time consuming. With Google Reader’s feed creation tool you can track changes to the page in question – and automatically detect when a link has been removed or replaced.

This, admittedly, could get somewhat cumbersome (if you’re tracking 100s or 1000s of in-linking pages), but for the real hub links, the ones you worked hard for, its worth keeping track – and this is an automated way to do it.

2) Track the pages you want links from, and see who’s getting links from them (and when)

Often times in link building you’re looking for hub pages – where several competing websites in your space have been listed and linked to. It isn’t that you want the same links as your competitors (that, naturally, is no advantage), but often enough these pages are going to be easier to get links from if you’re offering something unique but related.

Tracking these hub pages with the feed creation tool before you’ve approached the webmaster/organization in question is a good way to see who your competition is – and who’s actively engaging in link building. You can also catch new competitors as they come onto the scene.

3) Track when your link is added to a page where you’ve requested it

Once you’ve requested a link from a website and they’ve agreed to add it tracking when that link has been added is often a matter of manually checking up – another task that burns up time you could spend on more valuable things.

Using the Google Reader feed creation tool you can automatically detect when your links go live – and, in the mean time, spend your time doing better things than checking up.

4) Monitor your clients’ website(s) to detect changes/updates to content

When you work with clients (as I do) there’s a little of babysitting that goes on. Sometimes the work I do or recommend can be tossed out inadvertently by someone who isn’t aware of the repercussions.

Sure, you may say, “that’s their problem,” but we should be better stewards than that.

Tracking their pages with Google Reader will notify you when any content changes have occurred on a client’s website – which is a great way to catch a potentially-damaging mistake early.

It’s also a great way to detect when and how a client is carrying out your recommendations (since the lines of communication aren’t always as open as we’d like them to be).

5) Keep tabs on your competitors hub or topic pages, and watch their SEO strategies unfold

This one is particularly powerful.

If you know who your competitors are and want to keep tabs on their SEO efforts create feeds for their most important/central pages. Now every time they make an update, add content, rewrite something, link to a new page, etc, you’ll be pinged – and the change is tracked.

An added bonus here is the ability to track how often your competitor updates the page (since Google marks each update with the date/time they detected the change) – a kind of “fly on the wall” view of what they’re up to that is delightfully sneaky. Of course, it’ll depend on how often Googlebot returns to the page (which is a function of how “valuable” and frequently-updated the page is).

One thing: this will track changes to content, not the page code itself (so you can’t track everything they’re doing SEO wise), but it is nonetheless an unprecedented way to keep tabs on what the competition is up to.

There are far more possibilities – and undoubtedly some phenomenal ones that haven’t dawned on me. Got any ideas? Share them in the comments.

Note: Webmasters can “opt out” of this feature (blocking the creation of feeds for their pages) by doing the following:

• Adding <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noarchive”> to their page head
• Using Robots.txt to block Googlebot (though this one is a quintessential case of tossing the baby with the bathwater – it means your site/page is removed from Google’s index)
• Moving content into an iFrame (similar to above, though, this renders the content invisible to Googlebot)

Mike Tekula is an SEO Consultant working and living on Long Island. Check out Mike’s latest free resource: The Blogger’s Guide to Google Analytics

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

5 Powerful Ways to Use Google Reader’s Feed Creation Tool for SEO

I count my lucky stars that my fortunes don’t rely on SEO and PPC alone. I’m happy to be part of a couple of agencies with a full range of interactive and traditional marketing solutions. That means I don’t have to pretend like SEO and PPC always are the best choice for clients. They’re not.

I thought it might be refreshing to talk about when SEO and PPC are NOT a great choice for local businesses- but not just to discourage you- The reasons they don’t work can tell us something about the businesses, what they should do next, what makes a good business in a certain niche, and so on.

First, let’s think about what makes for success in search:

1. Relevant keywords
2. Prospects that convert
3. A competitive advantage or a not too competitive niche
4. Proportion of cost and revenue that creates positive ROI
5. Trackability that can prove that ROI

We’ll look at each of those in the ideal situation, and how problems in each can lead to marketing failures for local businesses.

1. How a Lack of Relevant Keywords Can Doom Search Efforts

I typically divide keywords into two groups:

• Brand names
• Category (general) keywords

The brand searches are the low hanging fruit. If a local business has a strong brand and repeat customers, there’s good ROI here. And you can make it even better by testing ads.

Category keywords could be vertical-related, offering-related, or geomodifiers. For a mexican restaurant, it could be “mexican food”,  “myrtle beach restaurant”, or “myrtle beach mexican restaurant”.

Where this breaks down:

–> If you get too long tail; for example, “myrtle beach mexican restaurant with California burritos” isn’t going to show evidence of volume in Google’s Keyword Tool.

–> If your vertical is too competitive, and you’re not near any geomodifiers that get search volume; e.g. a golf course in the boonies on the edge of Florida and Georgia might run into trouble- not committed enough to get good results from either state, not near a big golf tourism city, and “golf” itself is way too competitive in SEO and too expensive in PPC. Add in lack of brand recognition, and you’ve got an uphill battle that looks a lot like a sheer cliff.

2. Why Your Prospects Aren’t Buying From You

Naturally, we need our visitors to do something: if not purchase, then fill out a lead form or get on the email list. One of the three main components of ROI is CR (conversion rate). This pain point has a lot to do with the other four items-

• Keywords: People that search some keywords convert, and people that search others do not. So, if you don’t rank for the high value keywords, or can’t afford to buy them, you won’t get the revenue.
• Competition: The more competitive your niche, the more price shopping there will be, and the lower the conversion rate and ROI. If you can’t win against the competition for the best keywords, you won’t get a positive return.
• ROI: Some searchers come from more expensive keywords, and each keyword produces a different CR and amount of revenue. If competition drives down average sale, ROI may be negative.
• Tracking: If you’re doing purchases, you have to track the revenue per sale, and if you’re doing leads, you have to track the form submissions- KPI is either ROI or Cost per Conversion. If you have trouble with IT getting your conversion tracking or analytics implemented, you won’t be able to prove the value of your SEO and PPC.

3. Bleeding Out Due to Lack of Competitive Advantage

Too many businesses never think this through. Why should they choose you over your competition? What do you have that matters to your prospects that they can’t get elsewhere?

In the really competitive markets, often no business has a real advantage. Then price wars begin, and you’re either Wal-Mart, or you’re dead. This is called a red ocean, because all the fish are eating each other.

The problem with its opposite, the blue ocean, is that if your offering is so new that competition is low, few people know about it- and search capitalized on existing demand via search queries. So you might need a more attention-grabbing story-telling medium like TV, radio, or social media instead. If you’re lucky, you can attach it to a category keyword, but your conversion rate may be low because people are still trying to figure out what you are and if they like it.  So you either need a lot of money and patience, or you luck out and get into a category that’s not as competitive as mesothelioma lawyers or online dating.

But if you have no competitive advantage, you’re in danger of low average sales due to price wars, and low conversion rates because no one is really attached to you solving their problem.

4. ROI Undercut by High Cost and Low Conversion Rate

As we’ve discussed already, in PPC, the cost of the keywords can undercut ROI. And if your product is priced low, revenue will be low as well. If you have conversion rate problems, it takes more clicks to get that revenue.

Really, this is just math. The question is if the cost is low enough, the average sale high enough, and the conversion rate good enough. Use this PPC ROI Calculator to play out a variety of scenarios, and you begin to grasp how they’re related.

The worst situation for local businesses is if you don’t have a brand name or mindshare, and you have to go into category keywords. These keywords are much more expensive, and the searchers are window shopping more, which brings the conversion rate down.

We’ve seen with tourist destinations with lots of independent hotels that the single hotel owners have more difficulty. It’s easier for groups with multiple hotels to offer a portal site that satisfies the window shoppers yet retains the sale for one member of the group. Solo hotels are competing against these groups, national chains, AND the megasites like TripAdvisor.

These lonely go-it-aloners don’t get great ROI on category keywords in PPC, and they don’t have the content or authority to get many searches for those category keywords via SEO.

5. Untrackable Advertising Creates Doubt and Shuts Down Efforts

If you don’t have tracking, the more skeptical local businesses will assume they’re getting nothing for their efforts. Or if all business is bad, they may assume SEO and PPC aren’t doing anything either. In fact, it could be that most of their business is coming from SEO and PPC, but if you aren’t tracking it, they won’t know. Shutting down those efforts would not only hurt the search provider but also the business.

On the flipside, counterintuitively, some local businesses refuse to believe the numbers. This reminds me of a study I read years ago about doctors reading research. They tended to believe research that confirmed their biases, but if they found research that ran counter to their beliefs, they questioned the study’s methodology. I’ve also seen people question the researchers’ motives. We need to be aware of this very human tendency in ourselves when we look at our analytics.

The best local business owners use a combination of common sense, business wisdom, analytics and research, and also trust in their expert help.

7 Tips for Local Business SEO/PPC Success

The above is all rather negative. I’ll leave you with 7 tips for Local Search Success, the positive prescription for how to beat all those problems and win at the local search game:

1. Don’t start a business in the middle of nowhere
2. Don’t start a business in a blue ocean without a bunch of money
3. Research keywords before starting new business efforts
3. Create a competitive advantage if you don’t have one
4. Create a Brand and an Email List
5. Avoid price wars if you can
6. Use analytics and conversion tracking to guide optimization and prove ROI
7. Let your business wisdom and web analytics have a dialogue

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

7 Tips for Local SEO and PPC Success

While it’s obviously not true that a company is only as good as its search engine optimization, it is true to say that even if he/she is quite knowledgeable, a gung-ho SEO person can do a lot more harm than good without a well-thought-out plan to start with .

Initially it’s more than likely that you’re going to have to do some evangelizing within your company, at least in the beginning. So while you’re working on that as well as getting a feel for your company and what it does, there are a list of things that you should not touch until you’re positive of the outcome.

Of course you know everything I’m about to mention, but in our zeal to get everything just perfect, we sometimes forget what we know in the heat of the moment. So this is a reminder for newly-hired in-house SEOs.

Don’t Make it into an SEO Package

Don’t look upon your in-house SEO obligations as an SEO package or anything remotely like consultant-offered SEO services. When a consultant provides an SEO package for a client it’s not the same thing at all as being responsible for the optimization of a site indefinitely. A consultant will always keep the long-term welfare of a client’s site in mind when creating an SEO package, it’s true, but the structure of in-house SEO is different.

For starters, you have plenty of time on your hands, as opposed to the often too-short time frame an SEO consultant usually has within which to make an impact. If there’s nothing to show for the investment within a month-or-two, a consultant may find themselves out of a contract. But as an in-house SEO you should plan for your results to show gradually as this is what will work best with Google and Yahoo in the long run. You will need to draw up a one yearplan to show anyone who asks how your work is progressing what they can expect to see. You may need to tweak your plan as the year unfolds, but you and others will be able to measure your progress in terms of incoming links added, increased traffic, and most importantly, an increase in response rates (or click-thrus, signups, or whatever is required). In the end, the bottom line is what counts.

An SEO consultant may make use of some quite expensive tools to show results within a short time frame, and that’s not going to work well on a limited budget. You’d be a lot better off working slowly but surely to build links, and make changes, checking your progress with a selection of free and low-cost SEO tools.

Things to leave alone for the time being:

If you have some serious shakeup work to do, like a complete or partial website redesign to solve usability problems, don’t make the huge  mistake of going in all guns blazing. First, take the time to  build your case, and remember to say some nice things about what the website has going for it already. Admittedly that’s hard if it’s all in Flash and the search engines can’t see a thing, but do your best because it will make your task easier if you’re not seen as being completely destructive.  Don’t forget to use some credible page design diagnostics tools to strengthen your argument.

Canonicalization

Renaming pages and swapping parts of a website around without a great deal of thought is usually a mistake. Sure, it could have been done better if you’d been hired earlier, but if the website is ten years old and you mess with URLs you’re going to wreak havoc on listings and create a whole load of knock-on issues.

It’s bad enough as a newcomer, that you will be seen as ‘that jerk who wants to come in here and change everything.’ If you then have to admit a few months down the road that you made mistakes it will irreparably damage your credibility.

So tread carefully. As if you were treading on eggshells in fact!

Until you’re certain that changes will have to be made, you can make permanent or temporary redirects, but generally it’s far better to do nothing until you have a plan.  Naturally, making sure there’s only one version of the home page URL is something you should do anyway: decide whether it’s to be http://yourdomain.com or http://www.yourdomain.com and then make redirects to your chosen version from all the other possible variables that people come up with. There’s a great discussion of the pros and cons of using www here.

Another issue you may have to tackle immediately is any reputation management issues you discover. it’s never wise to hold back with reputation management: the sooner you can push down any bad search results for queries about your company the better. Work on that should start immediately.

If additional Web pages are to be added you’ll need to make a snap decision about whether to use absolute or relative URLs, and then make sure that the same rules have been used throughout the website: consistency is essential and more important than which choice you make here.

Another problem related to adding pages is adding content before you’ve had a chance to train any in-house copywriters how to liberally–but not too liberally–sprinkle keywords throughout the text. The trend now is towards content that seems entirely natural, but that is nevertheless built around a carefully-chosen set of keywords.

There is one thing you should never take for granted: tracking and analytics. You need to gather as much information as you can on the use and usability of the sites you’re responsible for, so you might want to take a look at what’s been used up to this point. Unfortunately, all too often it’s nothing.

Good analytics needn’t cost a fortune (we all know about budgets). In fact many professionals use the free ones. Google Webmaster Central and Google Analytics are a great place to start.

Patricia Skinner is an SEO consultant, social media coach & reputation management expert. She is also community leader at the nascent SEO Self Regulation Community. She can be reached any time through her SEO website. Why not follow her on Twitter & her LinkedIn profile.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

What NOT to Do When You’re Hired…

Webinars are a great place to learn any skill related to business and the internet. Unlike blogs and other content pieces, you aren’t forced to read text, which can get monotonous. The PowerPoint plus audio interface throws a nice wrench in your normal learning process and can help stimulate development.

The professionals teaching webinars are frequently thought leaders in their area. They will frequently bring their A-Game to the free sessions in an effort to attract you to a paid subscription service afterwards. Plus, you almost always have the opportunity to ask questions afterwards, allowing you to get into the minds of the experts without ever having to attend a networking event or spend $2k on a conference.

Put this all together and you have the best learning format available on the internet, which makes missing or not participating in them a huge mistake.

Locating these webinars can often be difficult. You might hear from your colleagues or on your RSS or Twitter feed, but that rarely occurs often enough. There are several other webinars on the internet that you will miss out on if you only look on these channels.

Thanks to advancements from the Google team, you can now use their alert platform to find a webinar about your favorite subject. Google Alerts will deliver daily updates to your e-mail inbox or RSS feed with every website match they find for whatever you input. For SEO, see the example below:

You can create these for any area of learning you want. Simply repeat the process and fill up your Alert profile with as many webinar queries you want. Of course, you can also leverage Google Alerts for other areas of business development and reputation management as well.

When you start getting these alerts in your RSS or Inbox, begin sorting through them to assess which ones are real webinars and which ones just mention your alert term on the page. Once you’ve found a few pages, evaluate the quality by researching the webinar service and speaker to determine if it’s worth your time. You shouldn’t have to pay for any of these – there is enough volume on the internet that you should be able to find free webinars without much trouble.

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to add it to your calendar. The nature of these alerts is that they will show you the page once it’s been created/updated, so you will frequently get a notification for a webinar weeks or months in advance. By adding it to your calendar, whether on Google or elsewhere, you will get a reminder (hopefully you have these set up, or you’re busy enough to look at your calendar every day) to attend.

The next step is the webinar itself. Here are a few recommendations for maximizing your return from these sessions:

Do research on the speaker before the event. Read past articles they’ve done, look at a bio and do whatever other research you’d like to get familiar with this person. You should find yourself with a few queries about their past successes, articles or otherwise, and this platform is a great way to get instant, good feedback about your questions about them and their experience.

Write down niche-specific questions. If you’re listening to the webinar, you probably feel your skill set is subpar as it comes to the topic being discussed. This means that you must have questions about how to start, proceed, and execute within the noted area. If you find yourself watching a webinar without any real questions beforehand, you probably don’t have much to gain from the session and are wasting time listening to it.

Take notes, preferably in a notebook. I find that I retain information better in notebooks and by taking written notes. You can get multiple notebooks and sort these by category, so you can frequently go back and look at your notes for reminders on what you’ve learned. This also allows you to maximize the powerpoint screen and fully take it in without any other distractions on your desktop.

Reach out and say thank you after the event. Acknowledgement is always great, and speakers will connect with you more if you make an effort to directly acknowledge and thank them for their presentation. This is best done through Twitter, which is a good way to open dialogue. You can also use e-mail if you want to talk more in-depth about the subject. This can promote further learning and also a possible business relationship later on. Should you see or talk to this person later on at a conference or elsewhere, you now have a speaking point you can utilize to start the conversation.

Rinse, wash, repeat. Webinars are a superb way to get ahead in the tech world. By utilizing and implementing the suggestions above, you have a great opportunity to match wits with the leading thinkers in the field of your choice.

Ross Hudgens is a Senior SEO Analyst at Single Grain, LLC, an internet marketing company. You should follow him on Twitter here.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Leveraging Webinars to Learn SEO (Or Anything)

I can’t recall how many times a prospective client has come along where my initial thought was “wow – this one’s going to take 250 hours of SEO to get them to even compete with all the sites that have been there for years”. Sometimes that turns out to be the case, while at other times, the majority of sites are so poorly optimized that the biggest hurdle is their longevity in the SERPs and maybe inbound link depth.

While the inbound link depth is one that can be the most challenging, ensuring your client’s site is highly optimized and deep enough in non-duplicate content usually overcomes some, or even all of that depending on how you go about it.

Where this can get complicated is often in dealing with a site that’s built either on an off-the-shelf content management system (CMS) or one that was built by a single web development company in a proprietary framework. In these situations, you’re going to need to get what might turn out to be some serious customization in place both in that CMS and on the front end. Just as often you’re going to need the underlying database modified.

Warning! This is another one of my more extensively detailed articles.  So grab that latte’ or cup of chai before reading further…

This past August, I wrote an article entitled Six Rules for Custom ECommerce SEO that gives a solid foundation of the “how-to” for customizing and automating search optimization.  That article covers issues including URL structure at the category/sub-category/product detail page level, and a few other ways to automate your work.

I also encourage you to check out Ann Smarty’s recent article on Strategies for URL file names to get even more ideas about that aspect of taking your SEO to the next level.

In this article, I want to carry that to the front end of the site. Not just for eCommerce sites though. Both that article and this one include methods that can be applied to any site that involves drill-down navigation.

Going Beyond WordPress-Like Functionality

If you’ve spent any serious amount of time in the blogosphere, a lot of what I’m about to show you will already make sense just from how well WordPress offers much of this functionality, though here I’m going to turn it up a notch even beyond what you can get from blog software, because I don’t want to get a bunch of #Fail comments. I’m paranoid like that, ya know?

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to use the field of Stock Photography as the product offering, but the fact is that you really can apply this to just about any type of products or services.

Now don’t go running to Google and seeing if what I’m showing you has gotten me results in the stock photography field.  Because you won’t find any site I’ve optimized in this niche.  Instead, I’m taking what has worked for me in other markets and applying it to the first market that came to mind as I, myself was looking for stock photos this past month.

From The Top

All too often I see sites that have top level landing pages semi-optimized or not optimized at all. Now, I understand that this is often because graphic designers think from a minimalist perspective, or clients demand an “uncluttered” look. That’s all good and fine if your client doesn’t care about being found through organic results, or if the niche they’re in is so thin that all you need are quality page titles, or if you have the time to build 45,000 quality inbound links.

Since we’re talking about taking this to the next level, let’s talk about the anatomy of your top level landing page.

1. Naming The Entire Group Properly

I can’t tell you how often I go to a site at this level and see the Title, URL and heading all say “Gallery” or “Catalog”. This is one of the saddest things going. There must be fifty million pages on the web that use one of those words as the ONLY name for such pages. Or how about “Our Gallery” or “Online Gallery”?

Please people – let’s drive home the importance of proper phrase implementation at the highest level.

So if you’re dealing with a stock photo site, insist on having each of these critical elements properly seeded.

2. Optimized Content

Here’s the next big flaw in most sites – there’s no content on these pages. None. Just a bunch of pretty pictures and maybe one word captions. One of the best ways you can beat the competition is to insist on getting actual content onto these pages. It may be as simple as the example above, or it may require more content. You may not be allowed to have it appear above the photos, but if it’s not, then you’ll probably need more than you would if it were higher in the page.

3. Avoid Ugly Repetition When Possible

Sometimes you can’t avoid it – you just need to have every link or every caption include the primary phrase – so instead of seeing captions “sports”, “landscapes”, “people”, you end up with “sports stock photos”, “landscapes stock photos”, etc. Well, there’s a couple flaws in this. First, it can look butt-ugly. And since we’re probably already alienating the site’s designer, we want to avoid that if possible. Second, look at the example “landscapes stock photos” – how many people search with that kind of phrase? A lot less than people searching for “landscape stock photos”. This gets even more difficult if you’re stuck with having to use the category names your client insists on.

Worse, even if you spend time training the site owner or their 16 year old kid (you know – the one they get to do site maintenance so they don’t have to pay a professional) you can’t control what they’re going to type in for category names right?

So how do we compensate for this?

Image Alternate Attributes.

Don’t assume this is one you don’t need to have customized. Sure, most of us know this is a fundamental thing – getting the Alt attributes seeded. Except in most eCommerce systems I’ve seen, the Alt attribute is either automatically set to repeat another field (like the category name) or it’s not even built into the system. Just because the caption is one word doesn’t mean the alternate attribute has to be.

So insist that there be an Alternate Attribute field filled in for every category photo, and that it has to be DIFFERENT than the category name.

Automate Image Naming

One way to help compensate is to actually name your image files based on keyword seeding. So DISC203944.jpg becomes Landscape-Stock-Photos.jpg for example. You may not be able to control this completely, but you can have the CMS automatically rename the photo on upload – to take the content from that Alt Attribute field.

Category Link Titles

How many of you make use of link titles? How many of you even knew these are valid HTML elements that can be used in your link structure? Here again, you might take the alt attribute field content and automatically add it in as the title for the link. OR, better still, have a NEW, required field added to the CMS called “Optimized Category Name”. So whoever is doing the admin will be forced to not only enter a category name (of their preference), but also come up with a 2nd name for the category based on SEO principles.

BINGO!

In that last suggestion, I’ve just given you a double bonus. If there’s an “Optimized” Category name in ADDITION to the regular category name that your client might prefer, and if the “optimized” version is based on search phrase popularity, you can automate all sorts of other things based on that new field.  Just one of them is the link “title” element.  Then there’s Category Page Titles, and then there’s the opportunity for better URL seeding! Stretch your mind and you can find two or three other ways to use this. But remember – it means having to customize most off-the-shelf CMS solutions.

4. Category Level Pages

Let’s take a look now at Category level pages. Some of the same methods described above can be used at this level as well, but now it’s time to turn it up another notch!

BreadCrumbs

By now we all know about breadcrumbs – that extra, on-page navigation element, and how Google’s making use of them right?  Well if you implement breadcrumbs, be sure to Factor in the opportunity to use link titles here as well.

On Page Headers

CAUTION – Many designers get a little education on SEO and when that happens, you can end up with the page Header “appearing” to be optimized.  So you’ll often see “Stock Photos – Animals”  as the actual on-page header.  Which isn’t terrible, since it would have previously just been “Animals”.  But look at my example above.

The Breadcrumb is “stock photos – Animals”, but the Header is “Animal Stock Photos”.  This then can only be achieved when you insist on that extra required “Optimized Category Name” field. Unless you actually TRUST your client to properly optimize the category names.  Which they WILL NOT DO.  They’ll say -I understand.  Then, they’ll forget.

Or they’ll TELL you they understand, but when they’re adding their products, they’ll get lazy.  Or think “this really long phrase isn’t very pretty to site visitors when it’s shown in the caption area”.

So Give them their regular category name field.  And REQUIRE they ALSO provide the optimized version.  Believe me – if you do this, and then review the first couple or few entries they make, you’ll quickly educate them enough to make a huge difference.

And by doing it this way, you ensure the header more accurately matches the now properly optimized page Title AND the now properly optimized URL since your automated system distributes it to all of them.

Developer Warning – when you go to the site’s developer and tell them of this requirement, you can not assume they realize that their code will have to strip out special characters.  And believe me, the first time that happens, and you end up with quote marks and apostrophe’s in the URL, the ensuing headache will come back to bite you.  So help out here and gently remind them to strip out all but letters and numbers, and for goodness sake, to use hyphens where blank spaces would be.

Switching Up Syntax

Now let’s look at that little bit of content I have added to the category page.  Note again that most sites do NOT have any text at all on their category page, or text that’s totally irrelevant to SEO.  In my example, I not only have content, but it switches up the variations on phrase use and partial phrase use.  This goes a long way with the long-tail opportunity every properly optimized site should be going after.

Tags

The illustration above doesn’t show how I use Tags on these pages, due to width restrictions in this column, but you can bet your sweet Sadie salad that when I can get buy-in from designers and clients, I like to include Tag links on category pages.  – So every tag that’s been assigned to every item within that category will be listed as a link on that category page.  personally, I don’t like the whole “tag cloud” widget method, simply because I think it’s butt-ugly.

Since I need to offer compromise choices to designers and clients, I WILL use them as a leverage tactic.  Something like “Look – we have to list tags on these pages – it’s vital.”  But instead of insisting we use the butt-ugly “everybody’s doing it” Tag Cloud method, here’s how we’ll do it instead… Isn’t this more visually appealing and polished?”

That way, I get my way, and they think I’m being more than accommodating to their aesthetic sensibilities.  And at the same time, because I go this route, NOT having tags doesn’t even get considered – they opt for my chosen method, out of fear that they’d end up with the ugly tag cloud otherwise. 

NoFollow Considerations for Tags

Here’s where more people in our industry split in regard to value and tactics.  Do you allow the search engines to index individual “tag” pages, or do you embed the “nofollow” attribute on those links and exclude them in the robots.txt file?  I’ll leave that up to you to decide, because I think every situation is unique enough that each case warrants it’s own method one way or another.  But personally, in most cases, I don’t use the nofollow, because I make sure the tag pages themselves are unique enough when I can.

5.  Sub-Categories

This is one of the most important lessons I can offer in this article.  One of the single biggest causes of duplicate content I’ve seen on sites of this type comes from the lack of advanced SEO implementation at the sub-category level.  Yet that means it’s one of the best opportunities  we have to get a jump on the competitive landscape since so many existing sites fail to consider this.

So don’t forget to apply to sub-category pages the same principles that you’ve used on category pages.  Unique content becomes even more vital here – to eliminate the duplicate content problem.  And for every additional sub-category page you can get indexed, you’ve got that much more depth and supporting relationship pages that point back to the main category page, which in turn boosts that pages SEO weight.

6.  Product Detail Pages

Now we get into the meat of competitive opportunity.  More than ever before, site designers and developers are using AJAX and other methods to display individual product pages.  This causes all sorts of problems on so many levels, I could write an entire article about this topic alone.  But for now, let’s just pretend that having individual, unique URL accessible pages for each product is what I recommend.

And pretending that’s the case is easy.  Since it IS what I recommend. Every time.  Always.  No matter how hip,slick and cool little AJAX magically appearing windows show up and hover over a higher level page.

Okay – so by now, you know to just replicate the same further SEO functionality on product admin pages in the CMS, and carried those onto the front end product detail pages as you’ve used on your higher level pages right?

Like having a the standard “Product Name” field. AND having the new “Optimized Product Name” field.

Now – let’s go even further.  Look – a shiny object.

DUPLICATE CONTENT

An even bigger cause of duplicate content conflicts on sites like this is the utter and total lack of importance given to opportunities that exist on product detail pages.

Too many sites allow a product to be added to the CMS without a photo and then FAIL to include a default “image not available” image.  Or just as bad, implement an “image not available” feature where the Alt attribute is either blank, or actually says “image not available”.

Which means you miss out on the opportunity to seed that image’s code with an optimized Alt attribute.  Even if it’s the same “image not available”, there is NO reason you can’t seed it uniquely on every product page with that product’s optimized product name.  NONE.

And you allow clients to get away with NO description or a three word description.  And the “buy” button isn’t optimized.  Or there’s no tags. Or there’s no Header because there’s a caption. Or there’s no caption because there’s a header. And all of THAT leads to….

A very high chance that your product pages are so much alike that they’ll be flagged as duplicate content!

So please – if you don’t implement 80% of the things I’ve pointed out in this article, at the very least, put more energy into the product detail pages.  You’ll thank me.  Profusely.

7.  Super Extra Special Bonus SEO Technique #739

If you paid attention to the illustrations in this article, you may have picked up on one of my favorite SEO automation techniques.  If not, go back and look at them and see if you can figure out what it is.  If you think you know the answer, say what you think it is in the comment section.  The first person to get it right will get a special linked mention in my next article. 

Going Even Further

As far as what I’ve shown you here, it really is only a foundation – a very strong foundation, but still, just a foundation. So take what you can from here, and let your own research and thinking help you go even further. Because I guarantee you, there are many more ways you can take this. I sure do – if for no other reason, than the fact that hey, I’m giving away all of these methods here. And bet your bum I’m not going to sit around while you all match the methods I’ve shared with you here.

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00.  Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com.  Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column here at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Taking Front End SEO to the Next Level

Quite a long time ago we discussed best practices for URL structure – that old post needs both an update and more details to discuss. So I decided to start a new post summarizing and discussing various strategies for URL file naming.

1. Why do we care?

URL is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects that affect both SEO and usability.

It affects:

• Rankings (placing keywords in the file path is one of the most effective ways to make the keywords more prominent);
• Click-through: a “clear”, “readable” URL can be another reinforcement signal for the user to click it;
• Usability: a good “obvious” URL helps the user understand what the page is about even before entering the page.

2. Keywords in the file name

There is no doubt that keywords in the URL matter (so far they even matter a lot). However this doesn’t mean that you need to stuff your URLs with only keywords. The best practices would be:

• Keywords in the file path occur naturally;
• Keywords in the file path help male the URL easier comprehendible and memorable;
• URLs do not consist of only URL: here’s a good point expressed by Onreact in his post on top 10 fatal URL design mistakes:
  

  Recently bloggers tend to shorten their URLs in as much as their posting becomes totally boring. I won’t click /2008/06/27/google if I see only the URLs (like, say, in an email) but I will click google-files-for-bankrupcy

3. Word separators

While Google has become much smarter when it comes to identifying separate words in the file path, a dash is still considered the best choice:

4. URL length

While it is still considered the best practice to stick to shorter URLs, the factor is becoming less and less important:

• Usability: Very few people manually type a URL in the address bar. They either use bookmarks or search history (e.g. FireFox / Chrome smart address bar that shows URLs while you start typing the title of the page) or just use Google to find the page again;
• SEO: Google can handle very long URLs (though it is still rumored that it prefers short URLs, I personally don’t see any big difference);
• Click-through: Google now breaks long URL in SERPs smartly: it only shows the parts which use the search term or even substitutes the URL with breadcrumbs.

5. Case sensitivity

We have discussed this before: URLs are case sensitive. That being said, if you have two versions of the URL live and linked to (which is only possible if your site is on Windows server), this means that both lower- and higher-case URL versions return 200 OK status when queried. This will cause some duplicate content issues but Google will most likely be able to figure that out (by choosing one of them). What’s more important is that you are wasting plenty of link juice spreading it between the two versions.

It is recommended to always choose lowercase pattern (just because there will always be people who will link to a more traditional, plain-text version) and to use 301 status code to redirect all other (capitalized, upper-case, etc) versions to the lowercase one.

6. URL Extensions

We’ve discussed URL extensions previously and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter too much if an URL have one or not. There are some pros and cons (listed below) but these are rather minor arguments:

Argument for using an extension: intuitive browsing: seeing an .htlm people may understand that is a page with content, seeing / people may assume that’s a folder. Although there is no direct impact on rankings, an URL extension makes it clear both to a user and a search bot whether this is a page or subdirectory.

Arguments against using an extension:

• Reduce the overall URL length, which is just better overall. Not that the 4/5 characters that are in the .html or .php really add a lot, but sometimes small things can make a difference.
• No problems with any technology changes (moving to anew CMS, etc): no need to redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

7. More URL tips:

• Cool URIs don’t change
• Don’t put dates in the URL.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

URLs and SEO: Various Strategies for URL File Names

As the Internet world continues to wait for Google to fully push online its next generation infrastructure called Caffeine, its best to understand why its doing so and then how best to prepare for it.

Over 5 months ago Google stated its purpose with Caffeine is to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions” and then Matt Cutts made official at PubCon back in November 2009 that with Caffeine a slow page load time will negatively affect your site’s search engine rankings.

Google’s purpose in its declared goal of making the web faster goes well beyond increasing general user retention but in its end goal of dominating the surging growth in mobile searches done principally on the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, & Android phones.

There is no declared page load standard but a general rule is no more than a 5 second page load time which can be affirmed via page speed tools or within Google Webmaster Tools.

The main ways to reduce page load times is with server compression and reducing HTTP requests by externalizing your CSS & JavaScript references to optimally a single file with the CSS file(s) referenced in your code BEFORE the JavaScript.

It will be interesting to see the Caffeine Effect on Flash sites which along with it hamstringing SEO efforts its also a page load hog.  Never mind that Flash is not able to render on mobile phones (exception being certain Android phones), although this will be changing soon for smart phones that don’t start with an I, but I will save that for a later post.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Caffeine for Mobile

One of the most popular articles on SEJ is about using social media profiles for Online Reputation Management (ORM), which is a great starting point for ORM, however, there are some problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of this method.  Most people will never have to deal with the kind of ORM problem that requires more advanced techniques, but it’s important to be ready, just in case you come up against an ORM nightmare.

There are two such nightmares I’d like to discuss today: negative terms in Google’s search suggestions and negative sub-listings on sites who can’t be shaken from the top 10.

There’s a brief disclaimer associated with these tactics.  They are a bit on the gray side, however it would be almost impossible to get your site penalized for using them.

Influencing Google Search Suggestions

If something negative about you or your brand starts showing up in Google search suggestions, you’re in for a bit of a battle.  There really isn’t an established method for dealing with this problem.  There are a few tricks I’ve seen work in the past.  For obvious reasons, I can’t give specific examples, but the overall tips aren’t person or brand specific.

Step 1

The first step is identifying positive or neutral phrases you’d like to see in the search suggestions.  If you’ve done your due diligence and have a slew of social media profiles, the obvious choices are related to those profiles, ie [Insert Brand Name] Facebook, [Insert Brand Name] Twitter, [Insert Brand Name] Squidoo, etc.  If you haven’t made social media profiles examine all preexisting content and look for common positive or neutral phrases.  If you still have nothing, just brainstorm some positive phrases, ie [Insert Brand Name] Philanthropy, [Insert Brand Name] Charity, [Insert Brand Name] Innovation.

Once you’ve compiled your list, the first step is creating more content targeting the positive or neutral phrases and/or pointing keyword targeted links at the existing content.  Ideally, add the keyword targeted content to the same site as existing negative content, particularly if there is a result that isn’t negative, but has a negative sub-listing (more on this later).  If you aren’t able to add content to the sites with negative content, use article directories or a document site like Scribd.  The goal is to get as much unique content targeting the positive or neutral keywords as possible into Google’s index, so avoid using the same content on multiple sites or creating content on new sites that haven’t already accrued some domain trust.

The final part of this step is getting keyword targeted links to the new content.  Avoid creating an incestuous link ring out of all the content you created.  You can use your social media profiles for nofollow links to get content indexed and then judiciously distribute links between your new and old content.  As usual, vary your anchor text by including some generic anchor texts, ie Click Here or example.com/totally-awesome-positive-content.html.  You don’t need to go crazy with getting links, but just enough to get the new content some link juice.

Step 2

You’ll need to enlist the help of a few friends to make this next step work. The next step is running searches for the positive or neutral phrases.  An increase in search volume will have a QDF-esque (query deserves freshness) affect on the search suggest and new items will be put into consideration and old ones will be re-evaluated.  The key to making this increase in search volume seem organic is cycling between searching logged in and logged off while cycling IP addresses.  You should not search for the same phrases too many times while logged in otherwise the activity starts to seem a bit suspicious.

The best way to achieve the cycling IP is using an anonymous browser service.  This is also a great way to get past the firewall at work.  There are a million different ad-plastered sites that offer this service and any one is as good as the next.

After a month, to check to see if this tactic is working, while waiting for the suggestion to change, use the AdWords keyword tool to see if the phrase is showing up in the possible keyword variations.

Step 3

To augment the effect of Step 2 you and your team should start using query refinement, which since the Vince update has been given much more weight than ever before.  Start by searching for just the brand name.  Maybe scroll through Page 1 and go to Page 2 or skip to Page 3 or don’t go past Page 1 at all.

Next, search for one of the positive or neutral phrases you’ve selected.  Click through to the positive result you’ve created.  Stay on that page and then navigate around the site. Don’t return to Google until you’ve cycled IPs or accessed another Google service.

Step 4

Paid ads can also help influence search suggestions, but save this tactic as a last resort, unless you’ve got some money to burn.  If you decide to go this route, place ads on your general brand and the phrase or exact match of the positive or neutral phrases you are targeting.  Place relatively low bids and set low budgets, and you won’t run the risk spending a ton.  Run the ads until you’ve seen a positive change in the search suggestions.

If you’ve done all this for a few months and still haven’t affected a positive change, then you might want to reconsider whatever behavior is causing this ongoing ORM problem of yours.

Influencing a Negative Sub-listing on a Positive Main Listing

Ideally, while you were creating your positive or neutral keyword targeted content you added it to the site with the negative sub-listing.  If you don’t have the ability to add content to this site, you’ll have to find a piece of positive or neutral content on that same site.  If there’s nothing positive or neutral on that site, you’ll have to get creative and should probably reconsider whatever behavior is getting you in so much trouble… more on this later.

Once you’ve created new content or identified positive or neutral content on the offending site, get that content some links.  Ideally, you can get some really strong links and the problem will be taken care of, however you’ll likely need to do more than get links because the existing sub-listing will already have links and age on its side.

After you procure some links for the positive or neutral content, get your team to start cycling between the following search behaviors:

1. Search for the brand name, then search for a unique phrase on the content you’d like to replace the negative sub-listing and click through to that content
2. Search for the brand name, click the negative sub-listing, go back and search for the unique phrase and click through to the content you’d like to show as the sub-listing
3. Search for the unique phrase on the content you’d like to show as the sub-listing and click-through

While you do this, make sure you are using the same IP cycling that you did to influence the search suggestions.  Over time, this should have a positive influence on the sub-listing.

If you’re working with nothing contentwise, you’ll need to descend a bit into the blackhat realm, and by a bit I mean you’ll need to descend totally into the blackhat realm.  I don’t recommend these tactics, because even though they won’t get your site penalized, you’ll really only need them if you’ve done something very wrong.

Start by creating duplicate versions of the negative content on social media sites.  Social Median is great for this because it gets indexed very quickly, will generally outrank the original piece of content with little effort and you can remove the content from social median if it starts ranking well.  Next, get some poisoned links, which is easier said than done, ie from spammy blogs or directories, .gov and .edu search results or sitewide links from a link network.  These behaviors will likely help get that sub-listing removed.

As a final caveat, don’t do anything from the above paragraph.

Before you start going buckwild, remember that your competitors, mortal enemies, etc can just as easily do this back to you and create an arms race that no one will win longterm.  The only longterm solution to this problem is not doing anything that will create ORM problems.

Josh Millrod is a digital strategist at Wieden+Kennedy, a full-service creatively driven international advertising agency with offices in Portland, New York, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Shanghai.  He would never ever in a million years do anything he just outlined above for any piece of business that ever graced his desk, home computer or phone.  Seriously… NEVER!  In his spare time Josh plays trumpet in a noise band called Grasshopper and runs a small record label called Bloodfist Karate School.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Advanced ORM: Influence Google Search Suggest & Sublistings

I first met Ian when he spoke at our SearchFest 2008 event.  Though we’ve communicated frequently via social media, we, more often than not, missed each other at conferences we both attended until Ian, I, Scott Hendison & Ruth Burr had dinner at Pubcon (where Ian taught me that there were as many flavors of salt as there are brands of beer & that archaic video games get new life when played on a High Def TV).  Ian not only has a wonderful sense of humor but is a very talented search marketer who expresses smart ideas in his own idiosyncratic way.

Ian will be speaking at SearchFest 2010 which will take place March 9th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.

1)  Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

My background is pretty absurd, really. I went to UCLA Law School, graduated in 1993, and realized I hated law. I mean, not just a mild dislike or a vague feeling of disquiet: I HATED it. So, I started working as a copywriter – I’d always enjoyed writing – and a marketer.

A couple of years later, I told my boss I was leaving to form my own company. He said “Great, we’ll be your first client”, and I was off and running. The Written Word, Inc. (later renamed Portent Interactive) was born.

Since then (15 years, officially, as of January 7th 2010) I’ve been running Portent. We’re a full-service internet marketing agency, but we focus pretty heavily on SEO, social media and PPC. Those three things drive 70% or so of online commerce, and our clients tend to lean towards them, too.

My own jobs at the company are sales, training our staff and consulting. That’s only 3 jobs – far better than 10 years ago, when I had ALL of the jobs.

2)  How can you tell an intelligent search marketer / social media consultant (one that you’d feel comfortable trusting your business future to) from one who really sucks?

A good search marketer / social media consultant thinks before they speak. They don’t bluff, and they admit that it’s not all a science. Plus, they understand MARKETING. Finally, they’re all good communicators. How many great SEO/SMO folks do you know who can’t write?

The really awful marketers and consultants expose themselves in a hurry: They talk up out-of-date strategies, try to treat the field as an exact science, and can’t write to save their lives. And they never improve or learn. Plus, when I meet them I get an immediate desire to hit them with a chair. It’s some kind of superpower, I guess.

One thing about that last comment: There’s a big difference between a marketer/consultant who’s learning and one who sucks.

3)  How has search marketing changed in the last year or so and where do you see it going?

Personalized search is the big, nasty monster in the room. It’s affected SEO, obviously. But personalized search is going to have a huge impact on how people use the web, and I don’t think it’ll be a good one.

If the search results are in constant flux, there’s no common roadmap for the web. It’s chaos, I tell you! Chaos!

I actually think we’ll see Google back off a bit on personalized search and real time search this year. But, by the end of the year, people will start trying to find alternative search tools – they’ll no longer trust the continuously-shifting stuff Google serves up.

4)  Please list some of your top webmaster “Analytics FAILS” and how they can be overcome (in order to increase revenue / leads).

1. No analytics. Yes, I still run into this all the time. Some organizations just never set them up. Others have analytics in the clutches of 1 person who won’t let anyone else look at them. Someone has to grow a backbone and demand access to the reports, or demand that the tools get set up.

2. No analysis. Reports aren’t analytics! Once you set up Google Analytics or Omniture, you have to interpret the data. 99% of the time, someone shows me the reports their previous consultant sent them, and it’s a bunch of exported PDFs from Google Analytics. How the hell is that supposed to help anyone? Step back. Look at the data as a whole, and the story it’s telling about your site and your company. Instead of tables and charts, write 3 sentences explaining what you see. You’ll learn to be a better observer, and you’ll start performing analysis before you know it.

3. No conversion tracking. That’s probably self-explanatory.

4. Mechanics. Failure to consider things like subdomains that can impact your data.

5. Substitution of analytics for higher thought. I see a lot of marketing teams turn into vapor-locked monkeys who can’t make a single marketing decision without data to back it up. Some folks say that’s good. I think it’s awful. We’re not computers – our marketing strategies shouldn’t be decided by computers, either. Use your brain. Go with your gut.

6. Attribution. Everyone counts the first or the last click. They rarely consider what happens in between. That means teams often shut down a campaign that’s actually performing. Start looking at your log files, or get a tool like Enquisite Optimizer and use that data to see if an otherwise lousy campaign is a big contributor.

5)  You’ve done a wonderful job developing an online persona which you effectively utilize in blogging and throughout social media.  How can an online marketer develop their unique personal brand and stand apart from others in their field?

Heh heh. You have to do what comes naturally. Really, I use Conversation Marketing as the place where I can let it all hang out now and then. That’s the secret.

Oh, also: Write a lot. The more practice you get, the easier it is to ’speak’ naturally through writing.

6)  What would you say to the many search marketers who remain invisible in their industry (even though it’s never been easier to be visible)?

Hmmm. That’s a tough one. I often feel invisible myself. I guess I’d say you have to take it one client at a time, one blog post at a time. Reach out to bloggers you respect, guest post and interact with them. Try to speak at conferences. It all comes together eventually. I hope. Cough.

7)  How do you deal with the many different types of client organizational dysfunction?

Sigh. I’m one of the worst at this. I’m a very passionate advocate for my clients. I want them to grow. Why someone would resist making a simple strategic or tactical change that would make them more money, or get them more votes, is beyond me.

I try very hard to see their perspective, organize and advocate for changes within that perspective, and not create havoc.

I also ride my bike a lot, and occasionally punch solid objects.

And, sometimes I lose my temper.

8)  Where does paid search fit into the sales / lead generation spectrum?

To me, paid search is a laser, while organic is a shotgun blast. Both are very effective. Paid search has less of an impact, but it is easier to aim and adjust.

9)  Talk about the challenges of hiring and retaining great search marketing employees.

The biggest challenge I see is hiring and retaining great thinkers and learners, and keeping them hungry for more learning. Most people just aren’t raised or taught to be intellectually curious, or to be real critical thinkers. So you have to really evaluate folks and look for a sense of excitement about the work.

10)  How has the market for search marketing services held up during the “recession” and where do you see it heading as the economy recovers?

I saw a big dip in early 2009, but then things came back stronger in the 4th quarter of 2009. Folks are diverting dollars to search as a ‘low cost’ alternative. As the economy recovers, I think it’ll stay this way. Most organizations are finally figuring out that this whole internet thing isn’t just a fad…

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Im-Portent SEO: My Interview With Ian Lurie

Last week with my post on hCard format I started a good tradition: overviewing microformats in an easy-to-understand way and learning to use them with help of tools. This week I am following up with a detailed look at REL attributes of a link.

REL attributes indicate the relationship of the current resource to the target page (which it links to).

Here’s a quick overview of RE attributes that can be used to describe the link relationships:

REL Attributes

* This one was invented by me to better organize the table.

**Note 1: Too much has been said about this one already, so I am just quoting the official wiki.

Note 1: Multiple values may be used: (e.g. <a rel="home me" href=…")

Note 2: Italics has been used to mark a draft microformat specification.

Although drafts are somewhat mature in the development process, the stability of this document cannot be guaranteed, and implementers should be prepared to keep abreast of future developments and changes.

REL Attribute Validator

REL-lint is a bookmarklet tool for checking values assigned to the rel attribute of links.

The tool checks any rel values against a known list and flags any not recognized.

Note: The tool doesn’t show what is wrong, just what needs checking.

More reading and useful resources:

• Usage of the Rel Attribute in Microformats (licence, tag, nofollow): save this as a sample usage of the rel attribute.
• Rel attribute FAQ

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Use Various REL Attributes – Learning Microformats

How search engine optimization (SEO) professionals can measure customer loyalty as a part of a successful search experience.

….

Boy, don’t you just love to hate my article titles?  I know this topic has been discussed numerous times.

Seriously though – for all the short term talk that happens every time we take a hit from someone who gives our industry a bad rap, we’ve never yet come to a clear consensus as an industry on how to properly deal with the ramifications.  I for one think it’s time we find a way to address it.  And I have a proposal on how we can work towards such a seemingly impossible goal…

The SEO Bashers

Since this article is appearing at SEJ, I’ll refrain from pointing fingers at individuals who I believe fit the bill.  Instead, I’ll just clarify a bit about what I personally perceive to be qualification for actually cesspool worthy candidates or issues.    Let’s start with the SEO bashers.   Talking heads who love to blast SEO as evil, how SEO is ruining the SERPs, or how SEO is dead for any six reasons.  We all know who the top culprits are.

Yet for every one of the loudest voices, there’s probably fifty other, less well known people out there saying the same things.  And honestly, we can disagree all we want amongst ourselves on how to address it. Whether we should leave a plethora of counter-point comments, respond with a counter-blog article, or we should just ignore the problem.

The funny thing is, none of these methods has any serious foundation at the collective level, in another aspect of our industry.  Reputation management.  Well sure, some of the actions a number of us take can be considered at least partial reputation management.  In that we create content in response.  Yet it’s always case by case, one at a time. Usually with a lot of venom. (uh, yeah, count me in on that one!)

And It’s always without any true cohesive or collective voice in method or process.  So sometimes it helps to one degree or another, and other times, it just fans the flames  of ego on the part of  h8ers.  And in it’s worst outcome, sometimes reinforces the view that we’re just a bunch of hackers.

The Words We Choose & The Impression They Leave

Another area lies in that oh-so-famous concept of black-hat tactics.  Honestly, we do ourselves no favor by referring to things in our industry with such a term unless we, as a collective body of professionals, have the courage to change the way we go about discussing the topic.

And quite honestly, I personally believe the only reason such talk flourishes at conference sessions, in chat, on Twitter, is because it strokes the ego of many of the players puffing up their chests to prove they can get away with some of the very things the rest of the industry can’t.  And we put such people on a pedestal.  Which only leads to more bashing from outside the industry.

I’m not saying that any of these people should be cast aside.  Ultimately, many also have contributed greatly to our collective success.  Not to mention that the majority of dialogue about these subjects does have value.  Yet I believe we need to go about it in a much different way.  And we need to be much more aware of the fact that our words reach more people than just industry insiders.

Without A Unified Voice Who Will Listen?

Because so much of all of this goes on, many agencies and design houses around the globe who venture just a little while into finding out what this SEO thing is all about inevitably end up lost, confused, and overwhelmed.  Which inevitably then leads to many of them using industry buzz words, then proceeding to hack-job their client web sites, while claiming “sure – we do SEO”.

And too, when big corporations come out with yet another “3 easy steps to online success” product, they get away with deceptive murder.  Claiming the most outrageous nonsense when it comes to how their automated solution includes SEO or how it will get them “found in the search engines”.

The Ultimate Price We Pay

By acting in these ways in these situations, and by failing to establish a unified standard for how we act, and what it means to be a professional industry, we ultimately prove to the world that we’re really an immature lot, rather than garnering the respect we otherwise know, for a fact, we deserve.  And the price we pay for that reality, is business owners continue to look upon our industry with suspicion.  And we shoot ourselves in the collective foot monetarily.

A Possible Path To Enlightenment

Imagine having one widely accepted entity that can give a professional stamp of approval to things?  Not from an exact methodology perspective of course.  But one where we combine the efforts of the many who have taken on one or another issue themselves?   That we can refer to as our industry truly setting an example?  Or where that entity can be a central clearing-house for business owners to turn to?  Or how about a collective voice that responds to attack mentality in a professional, legitimized manner?

There have been several attempts on a small scale, and even a few on a more wide-spread scale, to bring order to chaos through the years.  SEMPO and  the Bruce Clay Code of Ethics are just two quite noble and yet vastly different examples in a sea of attempts, to one degree or another to bring professionalism to the forefront.  To say to the world – we’ve got our act together as an industry.  Dialogue has taken place one article at a time repeatedly through the years as well. Yet even with all these efforts, I believe we can go much further.

The First Step – Cooperative Planning

So what’s a group of highly intelligent, adamantly rebellious people supposed to do?  What I envision is establishing an initial working group to not focus on the bigger picture, or the longer term objectives, but instead, to establish a framework from which we can move forward.  This group would then coordinate efforts on establishing  first phase web presence, where collaboration can begin in earnest, online.  A central clearing-house even, of information sharing.

From there, I suggest the panel seek out the support of our own industry conference organizations, and encourage them to open up one session at each of a select handful of the top conferences where people can come together and help get this thing off the ground in a more substantial way.  By having a presence that the big conferences get behind, at least in a supportive manner, we can quickly (always a relative term) bring even more attention to our effort, and people will take us seriously.

Of course, if they don’t want to, we’d need to find sponsorship another way.  Yet how could they not want to be involved if we really take a stand at giving this a go?

The Painful Reality

Now, I don’t have any of the nitty gritty details here.  Like many in our industry, I have what I believe are some serious ideas and notions about at least some of the things we’d need to do and how we might do them.  Which I’d be happy to throw into the mix.  But this isn’t a platform for my views at the detailed level. And they’re just my views, not really hashed out given the scope here.  Instead, I’m only providing a starting point that I believe is long overdue.

Yes, I already know how many objections there are to even attempting this.  Believe me.  In more than one discussion I caught on the topic this past year, issues came up about who the initial participants would be, what would give them the right to decide how things come together, what if later participants disagree on the early decisions…

And I know how overwhelming this can seem, because over the years I have served, and continue to serve, on non-profit organization boards of directors and administrative committees, and sub-committees.  Where chaos can reign supreme. Even with Roberts Rules of Order in play.

So I know quite well how daunting it can be to even begin to come together and attempt to form a cohesive group of people, let alone a unified message.  Yet these are, ultimately, excuses.  And I sincerely hope we can get past them.

Hope Through Example

As much as we all see the challenge in pulling something of this magnitude off, none of us can deny that there exist countless professional organizations in an untold number of other industries.   THINK AMA, IEEE, W3C, SAE… The list is long and large.  So why not let go of the fear and embrace the possible?  Why not make an attempt to do this thing?

Who’s Gonna Take The First Step?

Well, honestly, this article can serve as the first step.  If enough people who get all bent over industry bashers want to be more than talkers, and if enough people in our industry are sick and tired of being sick and tired of the disrespect we take on, then we can let this moment be the moment we stop being the doormat of the online world.  We can begin to shed the collective victim mentality in a real way once and for all.

But for now, that’s getting the proverbial cart before the horse.  The only real question left at this moment – is anyone else with me on this?

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00.  Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com.  Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column here at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Cleaning up the SEO Cesspool

Congratulations! You’re hired…

It’s a huge step in your SEO career to be hired for an in-house SEO department.

Now it’s time to plan your in-house SEO strategy carefully, so you can secure your position and give your company what they’re looking for: tangible results from your SEO expertise.

What your average workday will look like will depend on several factors:

• Are you a one-person team, or are you part of a team?
• Do you work for an average-sized company or a big brand?

If you are a one-person team you will likely find yourself with a huge workload as you struggle to get results that will be noticed in the shortest time possible. Unfortunately for many businesses SEO still has to ‘prove’ itself.  If you’re part of a team your workload will be lighter, but possibly not any easier.

It’s a fact that for most companies SEO has to prove itself in order to earn the right to stay. Sadly, too many half-baked SEOs who mistake what they do for Blackhat have created enough doubt and double standards that we are still not considered as important as we should be in many circles.

For now we’ll assume that you’re a one-person team and that you’re working for the average business.

Let’s take a quick look at all the tasks that will fall to you:

• Keyword research: do this properly. Monitor where your pages stand for all presently used keywords and keep a record, together with your record of all new keywords you introduce
• Competitive analysis: you need to know exactly who you’re up against and what kind of steps you need to take to get ahead of them in search
• Correcting canonicalization: make sure that as far as Google is concerned, there is only one version of each page of your company website.
• Correcting site structure (excellent article on the subject by Dave Snyder)
• Creating an internal linking structure
• Creating an incoming-links strategy
• Optimizing HTML
• Make sure you use a good meta-description tag for each page plus a carefully crafted page title (must be different for each page of your site)
• Checking site navigation
• Arranging for appropriate quality content that matches chosen keywords for each page
• Scanning for any issues that might be perceived as black hat by the search engines (such as inadvertent hidden text and so on)
• Monitoring pagerank and pagerank flow

Your Initial In-House SEO Strategy…

The best thing you can do off the bat is make friends with the people in the IT or web development department, and if there are in-house copywriters  get to know them too. The structure will differ from company to company, but basically you need to be on very good terms with anyone who will have anything to do with your end of the job.  Your task will be so much easier if they are your friends instead of enemies. This is especially so if, as is normally the case, you will need to ask for changes to be made in what they do.

If you build enough bridges you may even be able to delegate some of your huge workload to them.

After making friends and influencing people, the next most important thing is to get your web tracking applications in place, assuming they aren’t already there. In order to prove your own worth you need to be able to prove where the company was in terms of search engine estimation, and where it is going as a result of your expertise.

In all likelihood you will be responsible for the social media strategy as well as SEO. What you do in this regard is especially important if your company has any reputation management issues.

For a quick rundown on why you need a social media strategy, I can’t do better than refer to this excellent post on Mashable

When General Motors put together their social media strategy, they had some specific objectives they wanted to accomplish. Christopher Barger, director of global social media at General Motors, outlined the following:

A. Become more responsive to people/consumer audiences

B. Incorporate audience/consumer feedback into your organization more quickly and effectively than has happened traditionally

C. Make your brand a little more “human” to the outside world, and show people the smarts, personality and passion of the people behind your logo

D. Increase awareness of the strength of your current product lineup, and provide perspective/accurate information about your company

You’ll be asking ‘isn’t this for the PR people or a social media person?’ Technically speaking, yes it is. But a good social media strategy is simply one of the finest things you can do to get your SEO strategy showing gains in the shortest time–if you do it right.  The points outlined above should give you ammo for when someone above you asks ‘whaddya think you’re doing…’

Patricia Skinner is an SEO consultant, social media coach & reputation management expert. She is also community leader at the nascent SEO Self Regulation Community. She can be reached any time through her SEO website. Why not follow her on Twitter & her LinkedIn profile.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Advice for the Newbie In-House SEO

There has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding the concept of trust these days. More specifically, how TrustRank is likely to have a strong correlation with search engine rankings. This is not a surprise to most SEO’s, as trust-building activities such as link development have long been commonplace for just that reason.

What seems to get lost in translation however is that the practice of search engine optimization is different from building a trusted website.

Take for example a brick and mortar store. You sell a great product, maybe even have a decent location, and all the words on your signs have been carefully selected and strategically placed. The problem? The store is made of cardboard. It sounds too far fetched right? Wrong, this happens (online) all the time.

Not only will potential customers not trust your cardboard store, but Google won’t either. The foundation is flimsy and there are no obvious ways to determine whether or not your products are credible or of quality. What I’m trying to say is that SEO is well worth the effort, but it can only go so far without a solid foundation that proves authority and credibility.

While optimization is a science to be executed by professionals appropriately leveraging content and ensuring technical elements are not a hindrance to search engines’ ability to rank content, building trust is time consuming and labor intensive. Anyone involved in the process of optimization for a site will need to make the distinction between SEO and trust building activities.

A Few Trust-Building Tips

• Manage Expectations: make it known that the easy website optimization tasks usually have the least amount of impact. While these may provide some “quick wins” that will garner internal support, it’s not enough for long term success. Champion the foundational needs such as site architecture, content and link acquisition for true progress.
• Link Development: Google’s entire premise is built around the idea that inbound links are an indicator of quality, relevance and authority. Ignoring the painstaking task of acquiring links from topically relevant and authoritative sites is nearly a guaranteed fail if rankings are what you’re after.
• Authoritative Content: now I don’t mean slap some keyword-loaded articles on your site and call it a day. Meaningful content that is truly useful to your target audience is what will help to separate the good from the best. Comprehensive guides, how-to’s, comparison charts, whatever will add value to the customer experience. This is one reason why sites like Mashable, CNET and the NY Times do so well organically – they have clearly proven them as the authority in their respective fields.
• Prove It: show your visitors how awesome you are. And if you aren’t awesome, SEO isn’t your main problem. Post testimonials, credible 3rd party reviews, blog buzz, and any other accolades that support your claim of awesomeness.

2010 is the year of trust. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get cracking because the competition is only getting stiffer. Remember that building trust requires a different set of skills and tactics that will make optimization efforts and organic visibility a cinch. It might be harder, but like all things in life the payoff will be much greater.

Rachel Andersen works for the Portland based SEM agency Anvil Media, Inc. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing and specializes in SEO for large sites. Andersen has been responsible for the development and execution of dozens of search and social marketing campaigns over her time spent with Anvil.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

You Can’t Optimize Cardboard