Analysis and Case Study

SEO – Scope and Methodology

About keywords

Link Popularity, Internal Linking Structure and  Robots

Page Rank - Traffic Analyzer

Tagging Secrets: How to Flood Your Sites with Traffic on Demand

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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