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 often see new features, or hear rumors about other experiments going on in the sidebar (including some social or real time things coming – shhh…), but I really wonder why Google wants to use this property.  This long block is where Google makes a good chunk of change. Will new features bring more eyeballs to it, or dilute their click throughs?

I understand maybe using it when there are no ads to place – which they do – but why give other clickable options that take away ad share?  Maybe Google’s last redesign was still too traditional after all?  Maybe they just don’t have enough space in this format to try everything they want.

Take a look at this search for Technorati.  See?  No ad – but there was one!  I just didn’t get a screen grab, and now can’t recreate it.  I hate that. So even if they were only testing something, I don’t understand the logic on this one.  I know as an AdWords advertiser, it makes me a little grumpy to have to compete with more noise in this column.

click for larger view

Keep your eyes open. Maybe they’ll go the Ask.com route after all?

Popularity: 11% [?]

Note: The title is not How To Trick Google.  I am not a spammer – not in the slightest.  It’s just not the side of the fence I reside in.  But, as someone who breathes SEO, I do get curious about understanding blackhat techniques from time to time.

I followed a thread on Webmaster World (via SERoundtable), where an SEO was requesting a direct answer on a tactic he uses.  His tactic uses Javascript for hiding affiliate links from Google.  His external .js file places the links and content into the webpage quickly after it loads.  But, he blocks the external file with robots.txt, so Google never sees the full final page with the inserted Javascript content.

With all the technology that makes up webpages, and incredibly smart techies working as SEOs, it’s interesting to see what clever things SEOs still come up with.  Obviously Google engineers eventually learn all these new tactics, but are they really able to defend against them?  They provide guidelines on their Google site, but these guidelines are usually written loosely.  They often raise more questions then they answer.  And per the tactic above, I’m pretty sure that’s why – loosely, Google is able to take the stance against this tactic, without addressing (or even knowing about) this tactic.

As a whitehat SEO, I talk to link building tactics that “are against Google’s guidelines”, or CSS tricks that “are against Google’s guidelines.”  Not because I think that Google is definitely able to catch them automatically, but because there’s a possibility.  There are humans behind Google’s rankings – they might hear about it.  A competitor might report you.  Google’s toolbar, that’s on one of your visitor’s browser, may report back a different experience than the Google spiders report back.

Even though I fall for the loose guidelines, it does sounds like a big if though.  If Googlet wants to thwart spammers, maybe it’s time to get more clear.  Spend the time specifying the guidelines.  Is it fear that specified guidelines will act as blueprints to spam techniques?  Maybe – but it also might thwart SEOs from walking in the gray.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Google recently announced that loading speed is a signal to improved rankings.  They even gave us a free tool to gauge it.

It’s always been assumed, but with this announcement it was made truly official.  Did we really need Google to tell us?  Couldn’t we figure out that Google wants to serve fast loading sites?  Of course we could.  Just about anything that is good for a user is good for Google.

But before you go running tests in a panic, think about your site.  Have you been good to your visitors?  Have you been sensible with redirects?  Have you been mindful of bloated code and huge files (image, Flash, and otherwise)?   Do you have a good webhost?  If all of this is true, you’re probably fine.   Sure, run the test, but I wouldn’t panic and put in projects to fix prematurely.

Another note – above I recommended watching your page weight.  I like a good site validated to standards, but I’m not that kind of SEO anymore.  I’m quite sure it’s OK to be a little noisy in code.  Semantics in code is great, but don’t worry about a little bloated code.  Again, run the speed test.  See if Google thinks you have a problem.  It probably won’t be from tag soup.

The idea for this post was from a string I just read on Webmaster World.  I heard a webmaster talk about recoding to err on the side of caution.  Many agreed without the test, simply because they got swept up in Google’s announcement, but not reality.  I thought that was a really useless waste of time without some sort of real reason.  The bottom line – if your page is chunking while it’s loading, on several fast connections, you have a problem.  But I’m sure you knew that.

Popularity: 34% [?]

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% [?]

When Corey Haim died a few days, TMZ put up a page with a pretty spammy URL:

http://www.tmz.com/2010/03/10/corey-haim-dead-died-death-lapd-overdose-corey-feldman-lost-boys-two-coreys/

Dead, died, and death? Corey Feldman? Really???

Maybe it’s an overzealous SEO or overzealous logic in the CMS, but this is pretty much straight against Google guidelines (if it were a title tag I think it would get more of a flag). But my question is, will Google penalize TMZ? They’re a pretty big property. And yes, Google has penalized – even banned – big properties before, but usually for shadier practices. Does Google’s algorithm have a way of forgiving this spam because of the popularity of TMZ? Personally I think so. But what kind of message does this send? If TMZ gets away with it, then I think other webmasters will try.

Unfair for those who follow the rules.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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% [?]

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% [?]

So I’m not sure if this made the SEO rounds (possibly I’m just too busy hiding from my Christmas shopping responsibilities), but it was news to me.  Google is playing with removing the displayed URL and replacing with a breadcrumb trail type display.

It doesn’t matter if you’re logged in or not.  It doesn’t just happen if you’re ranked in the top position (like sitelinks).  Honestly, it seems pretty random.  I haven’t figured out what triggers it, but it does seem like a useful variation of the horizontal sitelinks.  Is it better than seeing the usual display URL?  Maybe since keyworded URLs still aren’t completely prevalent yet on the web.  Function over form?

Try it – I Googled  transformers toys but it’s happening elsewhere. All the more reason to have a good site hierarchy… now it’s actually marketing for you in the search engine result pages.

Popularity: 4% [?]