philadelphia seo

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.

How do you SEO a vending machine?  Turn it into a shopping mall.  Don’t just think of your ecommerce site as a shopping cart and content management tool – think of it as an experience for your customers.  Think of it as an establishment for your customers to find product information, lifestyle information, and learn a few things.  Think of it as a vessel for connecting customers with human beings – I don’t mean just through technology like IM, but via the content your writers produce.  When I think of sites that do it right, I think of sites that aren’t offer me choice.  They cross-sell without hesitation, but in a way that is useful and relevant.  They aren’t afraid to let me know what products don’t sell well, or get negatively reviewed.  They actually tell me what alternatives I might like instead.  They encourage me to come back with the size of their site, but with a comfortable navigation that gives me confidence in my next shopping experience.  They’re not afraid to link out to other sources if they don’t have the answer – even if it’s a competitor.  Search engines look at all this as customer value.  These are the sites they want to serve.

Which retailers am I talking about?  Well, three years ago I would have said Amazon.  Now, since I’ve become an almost complete online shopper (yes – I do my grocery shopping online), I’m noticing a lot more great retailers kicking up their experience.  Zappos, Barnes & Nobles, and Overstock are a few I hit lately.  There’s plenty more.

So this is a simple post with a simple message.  I like analogies.  I think they go a long way.  Ask yourself – is your site a vending machine?  If so, how are you going to change that?  If you don’t have the real estate on your machine now, build it.  Don’t worry so much about putting ROI to it – a lot of times that discourages a chance to really grow, despite how ’sensible’ and safe you think your paranoia is.

Oh no – not another guy trying to create another marketing acronym!

Well, I care less about the acronym and the ‘coolness’ of labeling something, as I do the real principal behind what it is.  As an SEO who came up with it for 10 years, I’ve realized I’ve taken a different path than many.  I don’t get excited by the algorithm manipulations anymore.  I don’t really get involved in the forum arguments on SEO minutia.  I started my professional life as a marketing guy, in love with the art of thought and context, and somehow deviated into web and graphic design.  SEO was a chance to connect it all together.  Now I think I’ve changed in the same direction that search engines changed (or will continue to change).  It’s not about “original content” as much as it’s about “original, valid, creative, editorial content with a purpose.”

Algorithms are headed in the direction of trust, reputation, and influence.  Google wants to rank pages based on the way people would rank them if asked.  Of course, there’s no way every human to assist Google on the billion of pages, so Google’s algorithms will have to grow.  And based on the progress (and patented algorithms) we’ve seen in the last year or two, it’s really likely that they’ll get closer to achieving that goal.  Is SEO dead?  The odds of it dying are as likely as search dying – nada.  It will just change, even if it means another acronym.

Searchable Content Optimization = Marketing

If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it at all.  Don’t create noise.  There’s enough of that.  But if you have a passion and a purpose, sing it from the rooftops.  Defend it like it’s your child.  Specialize in your vertical, and be an authority.  Care less about the algorithm and more about your niche and the people you can connect with.  Make the content easily available.  Make it readable and crawlable (= searchable), and groom it to be your voice.  Then, market the hell out of that content.  Set it to the top of your hierarchy and speak to it from your other pages, other venues, other channels.

For me, SEO is art.  And for me, in 2010, it is more art than science.  The split is now flattening in my opinion.  And if I had to pick an area to focus solely on, this would be it.

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.

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.

I provided an article to SmartBlog on Social Media. Check it out…

Click here to read the article

Google let us know this week that the canonical tag is now functional across domains.  I think that’s a fine feature (not sure why it didn’t roll out that way the first time).  I personally don’t have any reason to control cross domain canonical issues, but I can imagine several different applications.  Maybe it’s an offering for the spammer who wants to go straight!  Nah.

But it made me want to look at the canonical tag today.  About 4-5 months ago I checked, and didn’t see an effect.  I heard online buzz that it wasn’t doing much for anyone at that point.  OK – it’s new, I’ll wait.

But now it’s been long enough.  I was prompted to check again, but alas, the canonical tag really hasn’t been proven to do anything yet again.  It’s been months (February???) since this thing was put out and touted as the end of duplicate content issues, but I haven’t seen any decrease in my indexed pages.  In fact, I’m up about 10,000 pages in Yahoo and about the same in Google (in Bing I’m up off the charts, but that’s Bing for you).  I just reviewed notes from a site with more than 30 thousand pages from 2008.  The actual site’s page count hasn’t increased or decreased drastically in a year.  This is pretty annoying.

Is it just that the site: is that inaccurate?  Or is the canonical algorithm run so infrequently that it hasn’t permiated my client’s site yet (unlikely – it’s a hugely popular commerce site, but maybe there’s just too many pages to consolidate).  It’s hard to help search engines with the duplicate content issues when things aren’t working or reported accurately.  Makes me want to recommend hash tags in URLs, expensive meta robots implementations, or other nofollow tricks.

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.

Let’s imagine you’re asked to review a website and provide either a technical audit or a content audit.  If you’re doing it for a business, you’re surely expected to understand a bit about the competition and what they’re doing correctly.  How can you provide this information?  How can you leverage this information?  So, as an SEO, you have two choices.  Run in unarmed and guess like hell, or arm yourself with the right tools.

Granted, it’s a big SEO world out there.  Finding the right SEO tools is a little daunting.  I personally discover new tools all the time and abandon old tools just as often.  If I can find a tool that helps me with SEO and with paid search, I’m even happier.  For me, finding new SEO tools can be as addicting as finding new iPhone apps, bootlegs of Beatles shows, and a better cheesesteak.  I don’t know what it is about it.  I think it’s because each discovery helps me think a little differently about SEO, and provides a little visibility into potentially successful strategies.  It’s just a matter of keeping your eyes open and thinking outside the box.

So one SEO tool that I find really useful is from SEOquake (homepage).  I learned about them about 2 years ago because of their sweet Firefox plugin.  If you’re a Firefox user (and you should be for SEO… so many great plugins that you can’t get anywhere else), installing this plugin allows you to get instant snapshots on a site.  It’s the kind of data that helps see who you’re up against, and see if they’re worth studying for insight.  But I digress.  The SEOquake tool that really hooked me is SEMrush .  I used to use SEOdigger, which was a great tool for understanding what competitors are doing with AdWords, but SEMrush (which uses their technology) took it even further.

It’s not a free tool, BUT you get freebies with it.  I found that I liked what I was getting so much from just using the freebies that I upgraded.  Even if I’m not using it for paid search, I like to have paid search data.  It helps me decide the value of keywords for organic purposes.  SEMrush actually does the work ahead of time on their backend crawls, and pretty much store wait for you to ask for it.  Most services I’ve worked with would have to make you wait while they went and did the work.  SEMrush is unique because it’s on demand with no waiting.

Try it… I took this from their site.  If you want to see how your site ranks up (or your competitors), just go to SEMrush or change the domain in the URL string to your domain of choice.

Earn using your competitors’ experience

Even with these results, there’s a ton of insight you can find.  This opens up doors to a million keyword opportunities (if you think about it, that initial burst of ideas can be the most frustrating part sometimes).  I use this tool all the time in proposals or reporting, where I go to show a potential client missed opportunities.

Another tool I just found out about is SEOpivot .  Like SEMrush, it provides some free data and provides it on demand.  By having this data captured, it’s able to provide more information about where you rank now, potential traffic you’re missing, and what that traffic could look like if you go after (or optimize) other terms.  For a company that’s trying to forecast and understand what SEO can bring them, this is amazing insight.  This is on my radar to buy shortly.  I think the two tools can be used in tandem.  It’s good, good stuff.

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.