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SEO
principles
In all of our efforts to
write well for the robots, we must remember to
also write well for the human brain. Remember that the
human brain likes the
appropriate use of color. The human brain likes text
broken down into
manageable chunks or clusters that are easy to read
and absorb. Write your copy
using all of the important
SEO principles but be sure to strike a balance.
With practice, you can build pages that are content
rich and compelling
to read. You can create projects that are pleasing to
look at and still score
exceptionally well in the rankings. Did you know that
not ALL directories pass on Google PR to you. Some
directories are much more more beneficial for you to
be listed in....than others.
Many SEOs wait far too long to take immediate action
with creating new pages for high performance keyword
phrases that they discover in their research.
Please don't let your creative ideas sit too long
but...work to
implement your best strategies right away - today.
Ask yourself this?
What were you going to implement later this week,
(that you
honestly could do today?) Take action and reap the
traffic rewards
that are reserved for the quick and the alert. Make
sure your top scoring high performance pages include a
call to action. This is not difficult or time
consuming, but it can make a real difference in
getting results. You can easily provide a visitor with
some sort of reason to take action now. Challenge
yourself! How is your SEO comfort level with highly
competitive keywords? Next time you do your keyword
research, why not stretch just a little more towards
that more competitive keyword phrase.
Never stop growing your SEO skills and never stop
testing all of
your new ideas.
Are you thinking about a
change in design?
If you are considering a re-design of your Web
site...Don't just think
about the new colors and graphics and layout, but also
be aware of how the
new page structure will impact your search rankings,
bookmarks, and inbound
links. There are many ways to overcome problems, and
the goal is to plan for
any problems in advance. As an SEO...we are truly
copywriters. Not directly pertaining to SEO, but
interesting all the same, is about "copyrighted
material."
How much do you know about
copyright?
Did you know that when you write anything "original"
for your Web
site or for some other publication, that it is
automatically copyrighted to you? Even if you do not
post a "copyright notice" on your work, it is still
legally your work and the copyright is owned by you,
the originator (unless you choose to sell it.) This
includes any original work you write from an article,
to an e-book or even just a simple little "tip" like
these one that I write for you to read every day.
Think about referrer logs...when you examine your Web
activity reports: Do you have some top ranking pages
in certain search engines, but you're not seeing
coinciding traffic through those engines? If so, you
may need to rethink your keyword strategy, because a
truckload of #1's won't do you any good if traffic
doesn't follow. Do you understand that there is a
difference between creating "unique content" and
creating "high quality useful content." Just because
your content is "unique" does not mean that it may be
particularly "useful." Make it your goal to serve up
useful content that actual engages the reader and
satisfies their "original search." FACT: Did you know
that using your keyword phrase in heading text is
still influential? Of course you did. But did you also
know that there is no difference between the relevancy
influence in H1 H2 H3 H4 and H5?
Tip: Don't
over-use the H1 heading tag.
SEO And Development Must Work
Closely Together
Have you ever written up a beautiful technical SEO
plan for a site and then have it come back from
development all messed up?
There truly is no win in making a set of SEO
recommendations and throwing it over the wall to the
development team. The results come back wrong a
stunningly high percentage of the time.
There are many reasons for this, but some of the most
important ones are:
1. The development
team may not understand what you have asked them to
do.
2. The development
team may understand it, but think they know a better
way to do the same thing.
3. They may
understand it and implement your changes perfectly,
but roll out several other changes at the same time.
4. Last, but not
least, you could mess up too.
For clarities sake, when I use the term "technical SEO",
I am referring to the practice of reviewing the
architecture of a site to improve its search engine
visibility. This includes looking for problems such as
duplicate content, hidden text, bad redirects,
canonical redirect in place, etc. I also lump in the
process of doing keyword research and making sure that
on site content is matched up with the right keywords.
Regardless of how well you specify these things, you
can still easily get back gibberish from development.
Don't get me wrong - I do not mean to indict the
competence of the world's web developers. They may
well be doing a perfectly fine job, yet they may
implement something that is a search engine
optimization disaster.
Example Problems
1. One company I
know uses a staging server to test new site versions
before rolling them into the main domain. Being savvy,
they know that they don't want the staging sever
version of the site to be indexed, so they tagged
every page of the site with a NOINDEX metatag.
Can you see where this is going already? You guessed
it, they rolled the pages over to the live server one
day, with the NOINDEX tags still on the site. Yes, you
too can convert a PR8 site to a PR0 in 30 days or
less.
2. An oldie but
goodie: You can specify 301 redirects until you are
blue in the face, but unless you talk specifically to
the development team about why it needs to be a 301,
and why, you run a real risk that it will come back as
a 302. I have seen this happen at least half a dozen
times. Yes, you too can unintentionally blow away all
the link juice to the source page with this seemingly
tiny mistake.
3. I have also
seen it happen that a set of recommended site changes
were implemented perfectly, but the development team
decided to put the new versions on all new URLs. This
simple act screws up the search engines understanding
of the site. This *probably* can be fixed with 301
redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, but why
take a risk on that?
And, of course, if the the site changes come back with
new URLs and the 301 redirects are not already in
place … well, yes, that's almost as good as NOINDEXing
the page as I outlined in the first example.
Solutions
Ultimately, the way to avoid these types of issues is
to have the SEO work in tight coordination with
development. The SEO must be prepared to communicate
at a detailed level with the developer. The web
developer needs a real understanding of what needs to
be done, and why it must be done a certain way.
In addition, sometimes these problems come about
because of limitations in a Content Management System
or web development platform. Coming up with a best
second choice of what to do in these situations
requires that the SEO understand what the limitations
are.
These things can only happen if there is a close
coordination between the developer and the SEO from
the very beginning.
Yahoo Search Marketing
Celebrates Wild Year
Who let the gnomes out?
As Yahoo's new Panama search marketing system took
over the
contextual ad duties for Yahoo properties, clients of
the company
witnessed plenty of changes through 2007.
Yahoo's lamentable search advertising capabilities
drew
commentary from throughout the industry leading into
2007. It had
even been suggested at times that the company should
either let
an outsider (ie, Google) handle contextual search ads,
or sell
off the search monetization side outright.
But Yahoo has stuck to its in-house development of
Panama, and
spent plenty of time in 2007 releasing updates and
tweaking its
features. The Yahoo Search Marketing blog called it a
"bumper
crop" of updates and enhancements.
2007:
The Year that Search Grew Up
It's that time of year
again, where we look back on the last 12 months and
try to make sense of it all. As is customary in these
instances, I'm trying to put a simple label on the
year that will take into account all the various
trends we saw in the search industry. It could be the
"Year of Social Media," considering the explosion of
sites like Facebook, Digg and Twitter.
Or it could be the "Year of Blended Search,"
considering the changes made by Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft and Ask.com. For many, it might be
considered the "Beginning of the End of SEO," since
the rise of personalized and customized search
results, as well as quality-based ad ranking, will
change the way search marketers go about their jobs.
With these trends and others taken in total, it seems
to me that the best way to sum up the events of 2007
is to call it the "Year the Search Industry Grew Up."
Between the consolidation of players in the search and
online advertising space, the increasing ability of
search marketers to get the attention of the larger
marketing groups, and the spread of search marketing
to both very large and very small companies, many will
look back on 2007 as a coming-of-age year for the
industry.
The Year of Blended and
Universal Search
One of the most significant changes for search engine
optimizers (SEOs) this year was the introduction of
universal, or blended search results. Instead of the
familiar "ten blue links," searchers are now beginning
to see more than just HTML pages mixed into search
results. Video and images, news stories, blog posts,
local business data, and more are now appearing
alongside other sites.
The trend began in May with Google's launch of
Universal Search. That was followed closely by
Ask.com's blended search results in the form of Ask3D.
Microsoft followed suit in September, and Yahoo added
its blended search results in October.
The moves were alternately greeted with great
enthusiasm or a yawn, but none denied the significance
to advertisers. The need to get your sites in more
places, consider the effects of personalized search
and expand the traditional definition of SEO became
more important, as did the need to work and play well
with other marketers in your organization.
It's All About the Quality
(Score)
On the search advertising side, the top search ad
networks all incorporated a measure of quality into
their ad ranking algorithms. Instead of competing
solely on bid price, now search marketers have to take
into account factors like click-through rates, as well
as more ethereal factors like historical performance
and an ad's expected performance relative to other
ads.
Yahoo launched its ad ranking system in February as
part of its Panama project. Soon after, Google updated
its 18-month-old ad quality scoring algorithm.
Microsoft followed in April, adding a quality score
element to adCenter.
Year of Social Media
Looking at the surge in popularity of social networks
like Facebook and Twitter, social elements of networks
like Flickr and YouTube, the rise and fall of social
news sites like Digg and Netscape, and the beginnings
of social search sites like Mahalo and Search Wikia,
it would be fair to call 2007 the Year of Social
Media. Even Google got involved, with the launch of
its OpenSocial APIs.
While much of social media is seen as a diversion,
there are clear reasons for search marketers to get
involved. The definition of what is and isn't search
marketing began expanding to include other related
disciplines, most notably social media. The skills
developed by SEOs in linkbuilding, which themselves
are similar to those of public relations, apply to
social media marketing. It's also an important element
of reputation management.
Social networks like Facebook have been eyed by
advertisers for their potential targeting
capabilities, but as evidenced by Facebook's missteps
in implementing the Beacon program, advertisers need
to tread carefully in that area.
Beginning of the End of SEO
Search marketing is changing, both expanding into
areas like social media and moving away from old
stand-bys like on-page optimization. Not that on-page
SEO is obsolete, but its importance has diminished,
first with the increasing importance of inbound links
in search engine algorithms, and more recently in the
changing search results pages themselves.
Universal and blended search results are now requiring
search marketers to think beyond the basic Web page to
consider optimizing images, videos, and other types of
vertical content now showing up for many search
queries. Besides that, many of the search engines are
beginning to experiment with personalized and
customized results.
Google expanded its personalized results in February,
and launched iGoogle in May. Yahoo added query
refinement tools like Search Assist for users, which
are already found in Google Suggest and Ask3D.
There are two sides to that coin, however. On the one
side are SEOs' concerns of no longer having universal
control over the search results page. On the other is
the fact that this may push search marketers to think
more about marketing.
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