SEO and Social Media

Here are a few little tricks you can do to customize or filter Google results. These 4 are clutch tricks for me.  I end up using these more than most other tricks in my arsenal (oh, there are plenty…):

Enter -site: to remove sites from the SERPs: If you’re looking for competitors for a popular product, and keep seeing the big players, comparison shopping engines or affiliates, and would like to get a better feel for the other players in the landscape, this trick works well.To see this work, search for a key phrase like Wilson Official NCAA Football.  You may see sites like Amazon.com, Nextag.com, and Bizrate.Try the search again like this -site:www.amazon.com -site:www.nextag.com -site:www.bizrate.com Wilson Official NCAA Football.  See the difference?  There are several ways you can use this iltering for your competitive education.

Discover related keywords: Google has the ability to show pages with keywords related to the actual keywords you searched.  They’ll do this when their algorithms suggest it’s a better result.  To get a feeling of what keywords variation Google is thinking about, at a tilda (~) to the query.  For example, Google ~sofa.  At the very least this can inspire your keyword research.

Find File Types in a site: Doing a quick audit and want to see if a site is using a particular file type (like Flash)?  This will give you some insight: site:www.nike.com filetype:swf

Figure out where those indented links really rank: Today a Google search (on my computer) for Frank Zappa will show you Zappa.com with an indented link for Zappa.com/whatsnew in the #2 position.  Indented links are pages from the same domain that can show up anywhere in the bracket of 10 results, except Google groups them together for user value.  In other words, although Zappa.com/whatsnew is ranked at #2, it’s not really the second result.  It could be the fifth, or the seventh, or the tenth.When working towards SERP domination, it’s important to know exactly where all the pages lie so you have a better idea of who you need to beat.  Add &num=x to the end of the Google search query URL, where “x” is a number less than 10 (remember – without using Advanced Search, there are only 10 true listings in natural results on any given SERP).  Keep experimenting with lower numbers for “x” until the indented link is gone.  Once it’s gone, you’ll be able to surmise where the actual position of the listing.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Today I was asked to look at a site and explain why it’s not ranking.  The answer… the site was whispering.

If you don’t have content, Google won’t know what your site is about.  But I don’t mean any old content.  I mean HTML text.

Oh… you say you have HTML content?  Let’s see if Google can hear it.

1. Perform a search in Google to get your page to show up.
2. Click the ‘cached’ link.

3. Click the ‘text-only version’ link.

4. Find a sixth grader and ask them to explain what this page is about.

I once heard that Google has a reading comprehension of a sixth grader.  If that’s true, then you need to speak to Google like a sixth grader.  Give simple context, but be specific.  Speak up!  Promote your message, hammer it home.  Don’t mumble (and spam your pages with junk content).

Granted there are a several ways you can add contextual relevance to a site, it doesn’t need to just be in the body.  Tags and links still play a big part, sure.  But why be shy in the body of your website?  Is it that “text is ugly?”  Is it that “people don’t read online?”  All untrue.  You read this post, and frankly, I think it looks rather beautiful.

Form vs. function, my friends.  Form vs. function.

Popularity: 54% [?]

I just got back from SES new York.  It was my first one.  I’ve been in this game for 10 years, and always wanted to experience SES.  Cost and timing always got in the way.  I figured all the conference goodness was getting live blogged out anyway.  But I was wrong.  With more than 80 sessions, I hit about 12 of them.  There was incredible value in the side conversations.  It’s a social experience.

It was really interesting to be with rooms full of peers, all with different levels of experience and philosophies.  No matter how confident (or cocky) you are, it still pulls you out of your comfort zone. You start questioning everything.  You’re exhausted by the end.

One topic that routinely came up was the value of search for business.  Old topic but finds new life each year.  Is PPC or SEO better for your ROI?  That’s such an executive level question, but to the shigrin of the asker, it doesn’t get answered straight forward.  It can’t.  The answer is “it depends.”

So I did attend one SEO only session where PPC came up. The feeling of the panelists was since everyone expects PPC to only be an ROI channel, compensate with SEO. Compensate?  As in, clean up with SEO?  It was a bit of a knock against the PPC definition of today.

Wait… It’s all coming back to me.

When PPC first came out, it was a way to help searchers, who were looking for yiour offerings, find your offerings.  Period.  Traditional marketing.  PPC offered visibility into your efforts unlike any form before it.  Television couldn’t tell you exactly who watched or acted on your ad.  Billboards couldn’t do it.  Magazines, bus wraps – everything – failed at providing hard data.  So naturally, this amazing technology bombed us.  A little later, google put out conversion code.  Now we could tell how much money we made off an ad.  We can report returns on ad spend.  A version of interactive ROI became more and more of the focus.  Soon, in some circles, it wasn’t about connecting users first.  It was about buying revenue.  The C-level was ecstatic.  Marketers who got good at PPC looked like rock stars and happily spent ad budgets.  Life got easy.

Avinash Kaushik had a keynote, and spoke about not just the micro side, but suggested we think about the macro side. What happened to marketing in search?  What happened to the value of creating return visits, lifetime value, and brand awareness?  Demanding solely ROI means a lot of bidding on brand terms, of which a massive percentage would be picked up by SEO anyway (since you almost always rank for your own terms).  I know you have exceptions, and you need to compete against competitors who are going after your brand terms, but if you’re a shop selling dog gift items, and sell dog sweaters, bid the terms even if they don’t convert.  Let people know you exist for when they want to buy dog collars or leashes.  Get on their radar.  That’s worth the cost of a click.  You used to think your customers were worth more when you were blindly paying for billboards on the highway.  Today, with Google being the most visited website in the world, I would put all my money in search first and foremost.  Google owns your brand.  Not you.  Not your customer.  Customers find you first through Google 9 times out of 10.  If Google is your portal, advertise on it.  Don’t be cheap.

I think the SEOs in this panel saw the miss on PPC, and suggested SEO to the rescue?  If you can’t (or more likely, won’t) invest in PPC for the non-ROI of it, then maybe you’ll have some luck with the cheaper alternative – SEO.  Branding, reputation management, controlling search engine real estate, and marketing can all be done with SEO.  Though SEO is not an ROI channel (where the dollar can guarantee anything like PPC), it is certainly valuable as an avenue to reach massive, larger streams of qualified visits.

When I do PPC for my clients, I explain this value.  Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t.  But at least I tried.  Technology spoiled us.  We lost the real value of marketing and advertising.  The 10:1 ROI focus is not the solution to online success.  If you think it is, it’s time to look at the big macro picture.

Popularity: 15% [?]

On his blog, Matt Cutts introduced a form to report websites/webmasters who are spamming with links. Link spam is pretty much anything (according to Google) from links placed by paying for them, to comment spam (where people or programs submit hundreds of random comments to blogs). The link is http://goo.gl/linkspam.

“Be sure to include the word “linkspam” (all one word, all lower-case) in the textarea (the last field in the form).”

I’m all for keeping the web clean. If Google does want link spam tripping up their algorithm, I actually think they have the right to ask for help. It’s their engine – they can do what they want. But the beauty has always been that Google was supposed to be good at figuring out their own link spam. I mean, I never worried about link farms linking to my sites. It happens! So now should I worry that Google will think it’s link spam from my site?  If there’s a lot of it, will they react differently than they used to (which was to just cut the link juice flow)?

I guess if you have a competitor who is already killing you in the rankings, why not buy an automatic blog commenter and link spam the hell out of the blogosphere? Point the links to your competitor. Then call Google and call the competitor out as spammers.  Not that I recommend it – but it’s something I’m sure is being tried.

Popularity: 10% [?]

At the bottom of this blog, I was linking to on site pages with nonsense words.  These were completely made up words that have no rankings whatsoever.  I was only using javascript to link to these pages.

callicamally
sporgieborgi
blankimankorati

As an SEO we’re bred to think that javascript is bad. More than 2 years ago Google came out and said they were starting to follow these javascript links. Google knows that to better serve their users, they’re going to have to learn to understand this integrated language. They know not all webmasters are SEOs; in all honesty, I’m sure they don’t want them to be! Since many sites were heavily developed in javascript, especially for dynamic navigations, Google had to overcome.

And they did. The tests in the footer of this site showed it. Not only could Google index my pages that had the anchor text in them, but they could also index the thin destination pages. And they did so within 3 hours! Hey, they did say they’re obsessed with speed this year.

________________________

The Simple Experiment

I tried:

<a href=”javascript:var handle=window.open(‘http://www.greenlaneseo.com/temp/test.html’)”>callicamally</a>

Success!

I also tried:

<script type=”text/javascript”>document.write(“<a href=’http://www.greenlaneseo.com/temp/test2.html‘>sporgieborgi</a>”);</script>

Success!

Finally I tried:

<script type=”text/javascript”>var str = “blankimankorati”;document.write(str.link(“http://www.greenlaneseo.com/temp/test3.html“));</script>

Again, Success! I’m pretty satisfied with Google here. Bing and Yahoo? Not so much – they were only able to index the page with the anchor text. And even then, not every time.  But they never claimed to be able to (that I’m aware of).

Now this isn’t surprising to some groups of SEOs, but it really is interesting how often I still hear old SEO recommendations as being critical today.  Granted, this test isn’t exhaustive (the actual PageRank associated through JS links wasn’t tested – just crawlability), but it’s valid.  I think some SEOs really need to get caught up to Google, and start implementing what really matters – user value, context, authority, recommendation, and community.  Whatever you want to call it (SEO 2.0 or not), the wave is starting to build right now – get in front of it, and down shift on the old school SEO tactics.

Popularity: 14% [?]

For as long as I can remember, going to Google, Yahoo and Bing (or MSN, or Live), you could use the site operator to find out how many pages you have indexed.

Go to your engine, and type:

site:www.yoursite.com

Check out the results. Interesting to see what they give you. But the problem is, this is sort of bunk data. See, search engines don’t crawl all the pages they know about. They also don’t index all the pages they crawl. Thirdly, they don’t publish all the pages in their index with the site operator. Google once said they prefer not to display this data because it’s not really valuable to the average site owner, and not necessarily worth the processing power.

Quite arguable.

Google’s response to webmasters (and SEOs) is to give you a better, more accurate count through Webmaster Tools. But it’s not as accessible as going to Google.com and typing “site:” into the engine.

SEOmoz put out an article about using Google Analytics to get a better view of not the pages Google knows about, but the pages Google serves. Now that is actionable!

It’s a must read article. Knowing what pages serve and what pages don’t help you identify the pages that need the most attention.

Don’t have Google Analytics on your site? Hopefully you have some kind of sophisticated web analytics package that is configured to retrieve this type of page-level data. The more data you have, the less guessing you’re doing within your SEO strategies.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google is smart. They want to be smarter. Every search engine dreams about developing an algorithm that actually predicts a searchers intent, and if there is anyone out there who might solve the puzzle, it will probably be Google. I appreciate when Google can look at a search I make and understand when I misspelled something. But what happens when I’m trying to rank something that is intentionally spelled incorrectly?

Well, Google hasn’t quite planned for that. At least their algorithm doesn’t address it.

I’m working with two companies now that have altered, cute spellings for their brand. One ranks properly for the misspellings, the other doesn’t. The first has been in existence for a while with a lot of links, the second is equally old, but very small – it doesn’t have a large link portfolio. Both have the intentionally misspelled terms in their URL.

I’m not alone. Other webmasters frequent the Google help forums with the same issues. We do not want Google auto-correcting our spelling. Frankly, I don’t even want a “did you mean…” link in the result pages, but I understand the option. To be a company with an intentionally misspelled name or product, it’s pretty important you hammer home your intentions with your content and your links. You have to work harder to get Google to notice, just like you do your consumers. Led Zepplin and Def Leppard didn’t get spelled in the “officially” correct names until they were household names. Same concept applies.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Before we tackle this one, let’s set the scene for a second. I don’t think a lot of business folk realize there are different kinds of SEOs.  SEO is a household name today (especially in business) but since its inception SEO has gone through several different iterations. In the early days an SEO was more of a designer/developer type, and focused on crawlability issues. Later the SEO started focusing on improving findability – that is, how well do you spotlight content on your website for search engine spiders. Finally, SEO became a web marketing channel that works with other online and offline marketing channels and tries to generate mindshare and improve conversions.

So, today we have SEOs that may consider themselves experts in all three areas. Or, we have SEOs who may only have expertise in a certain area, but not in the others. When looking for an SEO, the first question you need to ask yourself is, “Are my problems in crawlability? Findability? Marketing? Or all?” That will help you ask the right questions of your SEO prospect.

Now that we understand the concentrations of an SEO, you also have to consider there are different classes of SEOs. I think of them this way:
1. The scammer
2. The dabbler
3. The expert

The scammer is a plague in the SEO community. They’ve been around forever. They are very web savvy, but don’t spend a lot of time studying SEO. They probably know a few black hat techniques that may get you rankings initially, but could also get you banned if discovered. They’re not likely going to do testing or research, and they’re quick to tell you things that can’t be proven – instead, they prey on the customers who are more trusting and even less educated. In reality, an SEO that says they can guarantee a number one ranking is probably a scammer. Be skeptical. Pick a top-of-mind, hugely popular keyword and ask them how they intend to get you a number one ranking. If you choose “football” and they spew some language using words like “easy” or “no problem,” put your credit card away and head for the hills. That is a term that would be incredibly time consuming to get, very expense (time equals money), and to be honest, quite possibly impossible to win in your website’s lifetime.

The scammer tends to take the money and run. Or they use paid search (Google AdWords) and buy they’re way up on the paid listings, then lie to you and tell you you’re number one in natural search.  Ask the scammer about reporting.  Ask them how they’ll use analytics.  Ask them about connecting SEO to other channels.  If you get a blank look, move on.

The dabbler can be dangerous or helpful.  This person is typically a designer or developer who studied some SEO.  Since the technical part of SEO should be part of the designers skill set, they may have read a few books, or blog posts, but really aren’t experienced in all of SEO’s moving parts.  If you’ve asked yourself the questions I asked above, and determined that all you need is ‘crawlability’ or ‘findability’, then a high-end dabbler may be very helpful.

It’s easy to be a dabbler and put “SEO” on your resume, and claim to be an expert.  Unless you’re being challenged by other SEOs, experienced hiring managers, or others in the know, a dabbler can easily come off looking like a pro.  Sometimes the dabbler simply doesn’t realize that their entry-level position is indeed just entry-level – I’ve seen a few dabblers get good positions only to struggle immensely when tasked with analytics, link building, and even content writing.

The expert is, well, generally speaking, what the others are not.  The expert has experience, has overcome enterprise level obstacles, does their own testing, and can contribute to the SEO space.  An expert SEO will sometimes have their own unique take on the philosophies of search optimization, and can usually connect the SEO channel with other online (and offline) marketing channels.  They’re generally more expensive – but often, like any marketing professional, you get what you pay for.  The expert SEO knows that building content and authority for your site works much better than trying to quickly trick an algorithm.  The expert can build links, can code appropriately, and turn data into actionable plans.

Good luck!  It’s definitely tricky, no doubt about it.  The kind of SEO your business needs may not be what another business needs.  So do your homework and ask questions, don’t be afraid to take chances.  Stay away from SEOs who offer guarantees, be patient, and you’ll cut through the fog.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Last week I had a great chat with a few SEO peers about communicating.  SEOs, like other niche professionals, usually speak a unique language. Where some developers (for example) usually have a client facing filter, SEOs often have to speak to business folk directly.  That means an SEO needs to practice communication.  Yes, practice!

A good, ethical SEO knows that nothing in this space is an absolute guarantee – no more than a lawyer can guarantee a win in court. But a good business person is bred to get as close to a "sure thing" as possible. For this reason, SEO can still be a hard sell despite articles being published every day about its importance. It’s vital that the ethical SEO go into a first meeting (or pitch) with this knowledge and an open mind.  Time to listen, learn, and ultimately educate.

Sometimes taking it to the kindergarten level helps in learning a new language.  It doesn’t matter how smart someone is as a business man – Spanish or French should still be taught first as a 101. So should SEO!  So when broaching this, I find the analogies help a lot.

One of my favorite analogies

Think of SEO like racing. To win a race, not only does the car need to consistently be upgraded (aka optimized), but many factors need to be analyzed routinely like track builds, track conditions, talent of driver and pit crew, talent of competitors.

So let’s imagine you are a team owner. You implement an expensive, cutting edge exhaust system on your best car. You notice in your trials that the car clocked better, but you still didn’t win that week’s race.  OK, can’t win them all!  Next week you install a new suspension, but again lost the race.  Worse, your competition still beat you soundly without the two optimizations you have. Uh oh.  Some of your team starts to get frustrated and confused. Theories and options are flying.  Chaos level rising!

But you do the right thing. You keep buying, trying, testing, and removing optimizations. You watch your competitors and study their moves for inspiration, but you don’t worry.  You stay on target.  Suddenly, towards the middle of the season something happens. You start placing in the top 5. The points and rewards (money) you’re receiving is slowly starting to add up.  Chaos level lowering!

Eventually you start winning. Your wins offset all your losses with a healthy margin of revenue leftover to enjoy.  But it’s important you think about next season, and your next level of racing.  New technology will arise.  New track conditions, new team members for both you and your competitors, and a hundred other factors will need your monitoring.  Don’t sit still just because you’re winning – if you don’t stick with it, you’re going to fall behind again.  You can’t afford to do that after all your investments.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Here’s one I use involving a Google engine operator.  I passed this over to DailySEOTip -

Use Google’s Brain To Find Keywords

I highly recommend this blog.  Ann Smarty is one of my favorite bloggers and has an amazing amount of knowledge in SEO.  It’s amazing, really.

Popularity: unranked [?]