Month: June 2008

More notes from Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto — this set is from the session Introduction to Search Engine Marketing, whose description is:

“Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) is a general term that encompasses the entire field of web search visibility, including paid search ads (sometimes called “PPC” for pay-per-click) and improving visibility in unpaid organic search listings (generally referred to as SEO, for “search engine optimization”). This session will provide a broad-ranging and concise survey of how search engines work, where to prioritize your time and effort, and key marketing concepts. The session is particularly useful for newcomers to the field, and first-time SES attendees.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM):

• is a general term that encompasses the entire field of web search visibility.
• includes improving visibility in unpaid “organic” search listings. The process of improving this visiblity is SEO, search engine optimization.
• includes paid search adverising, also known as PPC, pay per click.

Google’s Algorithm

One of the things Google will admit: there are over 200 factors in their algorithm. They won’t say what those factors are, though. In spite of this, you can still take Google and boil it to these two components:

• PageRank: An index of the “importance” of your page, based on things like who links to you.
• The words on your page.

Google has been getting cleverer with how they treat the words on your page. Features like latent semantic indexing allows them to recognize synonyms and related words. They also have the flexibility to respond to challenges such last year’s SEOmoz campaign to make Stephen Colbert the number one result for the search term “greatest living American” through Googlebombing and similar gaming. “Every now and then, when you think you have Google figured out, they’ll surprise you.”

Keywords

The first phase in any SEO/SEM campaign is keyword research. For this, we recommend The Search Engine Marketing Kit by Dan Thies and Dave Davies.

The old way of marketing was: we create a slogan, then hammer it into people. It doesn’t fit search. When people are looking for an affordable hotel, they type the search term “cheap hotel”. “Cheap hotel” is not something that a brand manager would want associated with his or her hotel, but it’s what potential guests are looking for.

The first step in keyword research is thinking like your customer. Think about the words users would type to find your pages. Brainstorm keyword categories that address your customers’ wants. Compile the brainstormed keywords for further review of traffic potential, competition and other factors.

Recommended keyword research tools:

• Adwords keyword tool — you can “use it in reverse” to do SEO research.
• Google Trends is “good for the executives”. You can use it to show them how pathetic the search terms they’re coming up with are.
• Microsoft adCenter. This is new, and has some new features, including a feature that projects keyword trends 3 months into the future. It also gives you a sense of demographics — who’s more likely to use a given term?
• Trellian and Wordtracker are also useful. They’re available in both free and commerical versions.
• Overture is no longer on the list. Yahoo! stopped updating it about 2 years ago.

Once you have the data, the temptation is go for most popular keyword. Typically, it’s one word, and the likeliness of “winning” the one-word term is nil. Besides, the average search term is two or three words long, so use two- and three-word key phrases. Examples: “Russian nesting dolls” and “online press release” (which also contains the often-looked-up “press reelase”). Build each page around the top two or three phrases that you would like it to be for: company or description, products or categories, benefits or lcoations.

Follow Google’s Guidelines, Use Google’s Tools

Follow Google’s design, content, technical and quality guidelines. Make sure that you keep up with the webmaster guidelines, as they’ve been updated a lot. The guidelines, used to be cryptic and vague, with suggestions like “It’s good to have links, but not bad links”. Google doesn’t really want to be cryptic, but they also don’t want to be gamed.

Over the last couple of years, they’ve creating some webmaster tools that will help diagnose your site and show you what they’re having trouble crawling. You have to sign up for it.

Content

Good SEO requires a mix of “writing and crossword puzzle” skills.

Some page writing tips:

• Include key phrases in your <title> tag.
• Titles should ideally be created by the marketing department.
• Find a natural way to reinforce the title tag with headings and subheadings
• Headings and subheadings also break up the text in a natural fashion and enhance readability
• Crawlers use an “inverted pyramid mentality”.

SEO copywriters need to learn white-hat linkbaiting techniques — see Matt Cutts’ January 24th, 2006 blog entry for more on this. In fact, be sure to follow his blog: he’ll clarify issues even faster than Google’s official pages, and what he writes often becomes policy.

Getting Links

Link building is as hard as getting publicity in the Globe and Mail. Quantity, quality and relevance of links count towards your rating. One high-quality link is better than many low quality links.

Getting listed on directories is tricky. Being listed on some directories is okay with Google, being listed on some others is not. There’s always some confusion: welcome to our world!

Another good source of links is the “Buzzing Blogosphere”. You need to understand blogger link love!

Be sure to read Eric Ward’s blog entry titled LinkMoses’ Linking Commandments, Part One (there’s only one part). If you follow only one of them, follow this one: “Thou shalt not use the name of Matt Cutts in vain (at least not publically or where it could be dugg)”.

Social Media Optimization: a new frontier, a new world shaped by Digg, Flickr and so on.

Pay Per Click

• 97% of PPC programs use Google AdWords. They’re the most expensive. (“If you don’t get it right, you’re putting money in Google’s pocket, not yours.”)
• 70% of PPC programs use Yahoo! Panama. Cost-wise, they’re in the middle.
• 53% of PPC programs use Microsoft adCenter. They’re the cheapest.

Analytics

Analytics tells you more than how many visitors you got this month.

A thought about Google Analytics: Google is selling you the ads and knows what people are clicking on. Some people think that’s too much information for a sales vendor to have. Use multiple vendors so you can maintain control over your information — split it up, use tools that belong to different entities.

Vertical search has been around a long time. Not much attention has been paid to it, but there are all sorts: B2B, book search, blog search, local search, image search, news search.

Here’s an important tip: optimize press releases for search. A well-optimized press release can hold its ranking for a long time. I’ve seen a 2003 press release that’s still a #4 result in searches today.

Google Universal Search

Google Universal Search: one of those things that search engine companies are creating that we’re still inventing words for. “This is the challenge that you have entered into.” It blends results from its vertical searches — images, news, video — with the organic results. Search results aren’t just about text anymore! If you’re thinking about optimizing your multimedia assets, now is the time to do it!

Google has not rolled out universal search universally. Only about 17% of searches will feature universal search results.

Here’s another set of notes I took at Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto. These are from SEO Don’ts, Myths, & Scams. Here’s the description of the panel:

Whether it comes from a cold call, a spam e-mail, or just misguided advice on a forum, there is some information that is just plain wrong. Other “tried and true” tactics are way out of date. Panelists address and debunk their biggest SEO pet peeves, and address your questions and comments in the Q&A.

Myths (Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings)

Lessons from the Buddha

A number of lessons from the Buddha apply equally to SEO:

• Do not believe anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many
• …or because it’s found written in your religious (or in this case, SEO) books
• …or merely on the authority of your teachers.
• Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Search Engine Myths

You have to submit URLs to search engines. Search engines will find you if people link to you. If people are linking to your site, you don’t have to go around submitting its URL to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and so on.

You need to provide a Google site map. It’s nice, but it’s not really going to help. “Most sites are spiderable the way they are.” If you have a site with millions of pages that changes often and your system can auto-generate a map, then mmmmaybe…

Frequent spidering helps rankings. If it’s already indexed, getting it spidered again isn’t going to do much.

PPC ads will help organic rankings! PPC ads will hurt organic rankings Google keeps its search engine and Adwords divisions separate and it appears that your ranking are not affected by whethe ror not you’ve bought pay per click ads.

Keyword Myths

Your site must have a keyword-rich domain. Having applicable keywords in your site’s domain name help, but it’s not make-or-break.

Your site must use keyworded URLs. These may give you a slight boost, but they’re not they key to high rankings. They’re good for usability, though.

Header tags — <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on — are necessary. For headlines, make sense to people, put keywords in them, but don’t worry if your CMS doesn’t use header tags for headings.

Words in your site’s meta keywords tag must also appear in its content. Actually, that’s the opposite of the intent of meta tags — they were meant for extra words that describe your page but might not actually appear in its text (they’re also good for handling common misspellings). They’re useless anyway — Google ignores them.

Content Myths

Content needs to have a minimum number of words in order to be indexed. The number that gets thrown around as the minimum is “250”. I made that up at a conference, when someone tried to get an exact number out of me! It’s a good number of words to get a basic point across, though.

You content must have a specific keyword density. Nope.

You should optimize each page for just one keyword phrase. Most SEOs out there do this — it’s a big waste. It’s hard to write copy for just 1 phrase; in fact, it tends to make pages sound spammy.

You must optimize content for the long tail. Another half-right/half-wrong myth (there are many of these). Just write an article! You’ll get found for the words you used. SEO is really about optimizing for keywords that will get used a lot (which is the opposite of keywords in the long tail).

Duplicate content will get your site penalized. A big myth out there. Duplicates are filtered in search engine results pages because they don’t want to show ten copies of the same article. They’ll show what they perceive to be the most important version. At worst, they might not show your version in the results.

Design Myths

The HTML on your pages must validate to W3C. It’s a good thing to do, but not for boosting your search engine rankings. Crawlers don’t care about web standards. You pages just have to be indexable.

Navigation must be text links, not images. Engines have been able to follow image links since image links have existed. Use the alt attribute for anchor text.

Don’t use Flash. Half-right, half-wrong. It true that you shouldn’t make make your whole site in Flash, because it’ll either be non-indexable or indexed poorly.

Linking and PageRank Myths

Google’s link: command is useful for finding out who links to you No! Ignore it! It often returns no results for pages with plenty of incoming links. Use Google Webmaster tools or Yahoo! Site Explorer to see who links to you instead.

Pages rank in PageRank order. “Toolbar pagerank” — the PageRank that the toolbars display for a site — doesn’t mean a whole lot.

Your site will get ranked higher if it’s in a directory like DMOZ/ODP or Yahoo! Directory. No.

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Don’ts (Lyndsay Walker, Web Analytics and SEO Coordinator, WestJet)

Between the <head> Tags

Don’t use the same <title> tags on every page. Make the page’s <title> tag content relate to the page. You have about 65 characters to work with weith <title> tag content before the search engine stops reading it.

Don’t overuse <meta>. The one that really counts is the description tag. It may not help with your ranking, but it may be used as the description of your site in the Google results.

You don’t need to specify GOOGLEBOT=index,follow in the robots meta tag. That’s the default behaviour.

Don’t stuff keywords in meta tags: they’re not really factored in.

Don’t use hidden text (text with the same colour as its background). They know this trick.

Don’t use doorway pages (landing page strictly for search engines).

When someone tells you to make a page for engines that doesn’t match your content, that’s a warning sign.

Google treats subdomains as completely separate sites. example.com, www.example.com and blog.example.com are treated as three separate sites by Google.

Don’t publish before you’re ready.

Don’t bury your links in JavaScript.

Don’t use too many parameters in your URLs. Use mod_rewrite if necessary.

Don’t stuff keywords into alt attributes. If this practice continues, alt might get weighted less by search engines, and that would be a loss for everyone.

Don’t use images when CSS will do.

If you want to use specific fonts for things like headlines, try sIFR!

Don’t use inline CSS.

Don’t use Flash to replace content. Engines can’t read it.

Links

Don’t attempt to get hundreds or thousands of links at once, especially paid or automated. Search engines “know” about this type of scam. The rule of thumb is that “Natural is good”.

Don’t engage in non-relevant link exchanges.

Don’t participate in link directories. Why would you want to put your link in a page that has just a bunch of other links on it? The links that you want are on pages relevant to your content.

Don’t participate in link farms. It won’t help.

Don’t focus all your links on landing on the home page. Put SEO on every page.

Don’t register lots of domains using fake names and addresses.

Don’t get “green pixel envy” — don’t obsess over PageRank. PageRank covers only link input/output and only updated once every couple of months

Behind the Scenes

Don’t guess what you should do with robots.txt. Use Google Webmaster tools for help!

Don’t have multiple URL variations pointing to the home page. Remember, Google considers “www.homepage.com” and “homepage.com” to be two different sites. Use a 301 redirect to clarify what your preferred domain is.

The Boss Wants It!

When the boss or your client insists on doing something that’s “black hat”, it can pose a dilemma. Remember that they hired you to be the expert — they should trust your judgement. Taking a risk means risking your job.

Do it right the first time. Follow the webmaster guidelines. Fight the good fight. Resist the temptation to go to the dark side.

Be patient. It can take months to get good rankings, but they last!

Build your brand — don’t gamble with it!

Get ahead of the search engine algorithm updates — chances are, if you’re following the guidelines, you’ll be okay.

Who are you optimizing for? For the engines? No! The users!

Don’t forget to communicate with your development team. Be good to them, and they’ll do what you ask!

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Scams (Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit)

Watch for SEO firms that guarantee #1 rankings. How can they make such a claim? They don’t own the search engines nor maintain them. You have to wonder what keywords might they be able to do this for.

Watch for firms that present proof of achieved #1 rankings. These #1 spots were achieved for very long-tail keyword combinations and non-competitive keywords and phrases. “It’s just fancy footwork.”

When an SEO firm suggests creating entry pages, doorway pages, hallway pages that don’t link to your navigation and may be hosted on other domains, run!

Beware of claims of “secret sauces” or when they say “we can’t tell you how we do it”. That’s a good indicator that they’re black hat SEO. Remember, it’s your site and your business’ reputation!

Watch out for claims of special relationships with insiders at search engine companies — “Oh, I know Matt Cutts!” Matt Cutts is a friendly, gregarious guy, and lots of people have at least met him. Google doesn’t have relationships with SEOs and neither do the other serious search engine companies.

Another warning sign: Linking schemes or things that sound like them. These require you to link to other clients of the same SEO as well as the SEO’s site. They may also offer paid link programs, which have recently come under fire. They promise lots of links via submissions to fake or obscure search engines, focusing on creating lots of links through “free for all” link pages. They claim to automatically get you links from blogs or social media sites. They’re scams!

If a firm claims to advertise for “hundreds of clients”, yet has only been around a very few years and has only a handful of employees, be wary.

Also be wary if the SEO doesn’t outline how they’ll spend your money. These people typically use it on paid ads and try to pass them off as organic search results.

Social media is a new can of worms — black hat SEOs view them as new toys to play with.

Remember, if it extracts value through trickery, it’s a scam. Fake content is a scam and fake blogs are scams.

“I’m a real believer in litmus tests.”

Flash intro pages: bad idea. Why are you putting “skip intro” on your landing page, the most valuable piece of real estate? (Try Googling for “skip intro” or “download flash”) Put indexable content on your landing page!