SEOpittfall » user centered design

Why Some Tactics are not Worth the Risk

pittfall — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 01:21:22 +0000

The road less traveled
On the long journey where we have been exploring the question, Where should I start with SEO?, our sixth post is all about the things that are possible with SEO that you might want to consider because of the results, but you might not know the risks.

No matter if you realize it or not, but you can just as easily limit your website’s ability to rank for competitive keywords as you can show up in search engine results. This is all through what you do and how you do it.

First, I would like to present the topic of whitehat, greyhat (or grayhat) and blackhat SEO. There are so many definitions of these three words and most tie them as a descriptor of tactics. Not getting into the philosophy of SEO, I will provide my view. I don’t think that there is a grey area when it comes to SEO and I also don’t think that they should be tied to tactics, rather, I tie whitehat and blackhat to intent. If your intent is to artificially influence search rankings (i.e. you didn’t earn the improved rankings) then I call it blackhat. If your intent is to improve a website to increase your website’s rankings (i.e. earning it) then I call it whitehat. Ok, with that being said, we are going to focus on tactics that are attempting to artificially increase rankings, so it would be classified (at least by me) as blackhat and I will organize them under the three major components of SEO, technical, content or relevancy development and link or authority development.

Technical
Delivering a different experience to a search engine (i.e. different content) than you would when a person requests a page would be considered cloaking and an attempt to artificially inflate rankings.

Content Development
Using technology to build a large number of pages that are specifically designed to rank for particular keywords automatically that wouldn’t normally be accessible to visitors through navigation. This has become something over the past few years that are being pitched and implemented but I contend that if it is worth doing, it is worth doing it right.

Link Development
The greatest area where blackhat SEOs are in their element and it is also the area that can get your website into the greatest risk organically. The best example of what not to do (in my professional opinion) in link development is getting links that you paid for. Paid links look simple, don’t typically cost much and are likely being leveraged by your competitors. They are typically difficult for search engines to determine and they can deliver rankings, but I don’t feel they are worth the risk.

There are a number of things that you have likely considered that would help you improve your rankings, but just like an athlete considering using steroids, you could increase your performance but only for a period of time and there are other costs associated with the increased performance. Focus on what will improve your visitor’s experience, great content with a purpose, clear paths to information and conversions while ensuring search engines can understand that content is key to ranking as well as performing competitively.

Do what’s right, for the right reason… you might not always be #1, but you will always perform well for a long period of time. I would rather continue to perform rather than just have a great year or two, but that might just be me.

One post left in the series, Steady as she goes – How to Set Goals for Continual Success, expect it in the next month or so.

Cheers!

Why Some Tactics are not Worth the Risk
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Google Knowledge Graph – Good or Bad?

pittfall — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 02:31:08 +0000

Google introduced their Knowledge Graph back in May with the intent of providing information that is related to people, places or things that is related to the search and attempts to answer questions that you intended or didn’t intend to ask. Pictured at the right, is the knowledge graph for the search for “Chicago Cubs” and it provides a logo, basic description, team info, posts from Google+, players, location information for Wrigley Field, reviews, events and other information regarding the team.

You probably have seen this appear for a number of searches you have made over the past few months on Google, but why is this addition to Google’s universal search a good thing for you and why might it also be a bad thing?

Let’s explore:
From a user perspective, this is very valuable information that is relevant to the search query. The information provided in the extra information provided defines what was searched for as well as relevant, current and even historical information, limiting the need to click through to a website, minimizing the effort required to find basic information.

This is also valuable to Google, they actually accomplish a number of things with one move.

The first, they get the opportunity to provide the user with information they are looking for without having to click through to a website, keeping them on a Google property.

The second, they actually determine what sources will provide the information, so they glean this information from other sources (aka, they don’t have to take credit or source the data) and actually limit the sources’ ability to gain a visitor and make a conversion.

Third, Google fills the page above the fold with information that is relevant to the search term, even when paid advertisements are not fully leveraged and don’t fill the page.

Fourth, Google can cross promote other properties that they own or have a direct relationship. Including YouTube, Google+, Google Maps/Places/+ Local, Zagat, image search, news, Google Shopping, Google Books and more.

Finally, Google also gains the ability to train users to look to the right rail for pertinent information and this will help their advertisers gain impressions for other terms as users are more likely to scan the full page prior to scrolling down or modifying their search.

This isn’t a bad thing, don’t get me wrong. As a marketer, I want engaged visitors that are looking for more information than simple data points, but I also see the value in providing valuable information as a means to introducing them to my brand and what services or products I offer. Without the websites producing and hosting this information, where would Google gain this information to provide to visitors?

Google Knowledge Graph – Good or Bad?
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

The New Politics of SEO

pittfall — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 02:17:36 +0000

I am sure you are aware of the notifications that began showing up in Google Webmaster Tools (Google Sending Notifications) and how they appear to be penalties but, after clarification from Google via Matt Cutts (Google Updates Link Warnings). Now, one of the most recent conversations that have been happening in the industry is how to proactively identify and address removal of these links.

There are two things I have a concern with:
First, you don’t have control of the links pointed to your site, so how could Google or any other engine penalize your site because of shady links pointed to your site? They shouldn’t and not likely to penalize your site either. However, that doesn’t mean you should be trying to get as many links as possible, if you have too many links from junk websites you are likely going to be considered as junk (the old birds of a feather flock together bit).

If this was the case, your competitors could target your site with negative links to bring down your reputation.

Second, if you are spending time trying to figure out what bad links are pointed to your site and trying to get them removed, are you spending your time on what matters most? Namely, are you focused on improving your site for your visitors, because that is where your time is best served.

This doesn’t mean that you might not need to do some damage control if you have trusted your site to someone or an organization that has a short-sighted vision for your website or if you are working to improve your online reputation. One more reason that who you entrust to help you improve your website’s performance should have the same passion and desire for your website, like you. You get what you pay for…

What are your thoughts?
Have you experienced or know someone that has seen a negative impact to your rankings from the recent notices from Google?
What are you doing to address these concerns?

Don’t forget to check out Eric Ward’s post on the topic

The New Politics of SEO
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

How to Start on Your Journey

pittfall — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 16:15:21 +0000

I would walk 500 miles – How to Start on Your Journey
To better understand how to get to where you want to be organically you have to recognize what you will need to navigate from where you are to where you want to be. You will also need to measure your progress, we will get into that in the next post as part of the series “Where should I start with SEO.”

Before you begin optimizing your content you will need to know what keywords you want to rank for. To learn more about some pitfalls regarding keywords you will find more information here. Let’s explore the steps to set your course to top rankings, it all begins with:

Research
Finding out the most appropriate keywords to target is one of the most important steps in performing in organic search. You will need to find the most appropriate keywords to your website’s content as well as the keywords that have enough search demand that will get you enough traffic to make the cost of your optimization efforts worth while. I have always been on the side of having an exhaustive list of keywords, much more that you will likely need to target to be successful.

To get a sense of the search demand and the relevant value of the keyword, I suggest that you utilize some free paid search tools that will give you a better understanding of search demand as well as market demand (the competitive landscape and the value that has been placed on a visitor by those paying to advertise for the keywords). You can do this easily by visiting the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, you can have the tool look at your content, see keywords by category or even look for keywords based on others. There is also functionality to see the demand by broad, phrase or exact match, language, location and even device type.

The limit of the tool is that you can only get a limited number of keywords per search, so you will likely need to spend some time and execute a number of searches to get your exhaustive list. You can even download the lists via Excel or Google Docs.

Organization
After you have your list of keywords, you will need to pull your content list (explained in the SEO Profile post) and start selecting keywords from your list for each page. A good rule of thumb is to pick shorter or root keywords for top category pages and selecting longer tail keywords (more specific) for deeper pages in your site.

Benchmark Your Keywords
When you have the keywords that you will optimize for, if you have a site, you need to find out where you rank for these keywords. This can be done manually or utilize a tool to automate this process. There are a number of ranking checking tools (Advanced Web Ranking is a tool that I have used and is very useful) that you can use to benchmark and measure your rankings regularly.

Application
When you have your keywords identified by page, you can now begin the process in incorporating your keywords into your pages. You will need to have the targeted keywords you have selected in the titles, descriptions, headings and in the page copy. If you haven’t built your site yet, this is a great opportunity to start with optimized copy, if you already have a site, you will need to review your content and update accordingly.

Next, we will look at measuring your progress.

How to Start on Your Journey
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Build a Band with Your Online Marketing Channels

pittfall — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:59:48 +0000

I am naturally a person that uses relational information to better understand (and explain) complex things. This is no different when it comes to SEO and online marketing in general.

One way that many use to remember things is through acronyms, the latest is POEM, Paid, Owned and Earned Media. I wanted to dig in a little and explain what it is and how it is related to your online marketing program.

Paid Media
Paid media consists of your paid marketing or anything that you are placing marketing budget against for delivery of visitors or display of your marketing message. This includes both paid search (PPC) and online display advertising (ODA). Basically, you pay to play in this channel.

Owned Media
Owned media includes all of the pieces that you own or have complete control over. This includes your website, and because of this, it is where search engine optimization (SEO) lives. The distinction with paid search (I know you own your marketing copy and control where your ads are placed) is that you can only indirectly influence to get visitors and display your marketing message. Basically, you have full control over the channel (mostly).

Earned Media
Earned media is your customers are the channel, traditionally this is referred to as word of mouth (WOM), now it is digital WOM. This includes social media because you don’t have to be present for your brand or website to be the topic of conversation. Basically, your customers, supporters and even opposition become the channel.

Ok, I understand this Steve… you aren’t presenting anything new.

The difference between the way we have typically presented is that it is all together as it should be, you can’t pull paid search out of POEM, nor SEO or Social Media. The online landscape continues to change, more rapidly than ever, the lines will continue to blur as time goes on.

This is awesome news for online marketing, you can either look at it as another cost or more things that you have to do to be able to compete online or you can look at this as another way to build really great experiences for your customers that span across channels. Don’t get me wrong, this will continue to make things harder, but I don’t know about you, I didn’t get into this business because it is easy. I love a challenge and this is yet another thing to push those not in it for improving the web out. This is good for all of us.

The only way it will work is if it is coordinated and playing together like a band and a marketing project should be like a great song, sometimes it might be a solo (PPC, SEO or social media) but typically, the best songs have depth and breathe.

So, I guess the only thing you might want to ask yourself is if your marketing efforts are playing together in tune are off playing their own tune?

Build a Band with Your Online Marketing Channels
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Thesis WordPress Framework

pittfall — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 03:28:57 +0000

I think I know what you are thinking… what are you pitching some affiliate program for some paid WordPress template?
(aka, what’s in it for you, Steve?)

Fair question and the short answer is YES!

Yes, I am an affiliate of Thesis from DIYthemes.com… good, we got that out of the way, I suck at lying about stuff like this anyway.

I want you to know why I am not only an affiliate but a proud supporter and user of the Thesis framework for WordPress. I stand behind it and would recommend it, that is why I am an affiliate.

I have been using this framework on SEOpittfall.com for a number of years, in fact when moving onto WordPress from Blogger, I went through 4 different themes in less than a year. Never finding one that was fully functional or one that could keep up with the updates to WordPress itself. Then I found Thesis in 2008 and quickly found that it could handle updates from WordPress because it isn’t merely a theme (that developers fail to update or maintain) but a framework that sits on top of of the platform and is updated to adjust to changes to WordPress as well as the enhancements that come with new versions.

Why, because there is support from DIYthemes as well as the community that have sprung up to support one another on the framework. Recently, I updated to the latest version of Thesis, seeing that I am not very proficient in development, I reached out to the forum and was honestly surprised at the speed of response.

It wasn’t a moderator that first responded but another member of the community in twelve minutes with a solution to my dilemma. I haven’t found another community of people as supportive of a blogging theme before. I don’t think you could find a better value or solution for WordPress.

Cheers!

Thesis WordPress Framework
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

iAcquire – Did Google Overreact?

pittfall — Sat, 26 May 2012 01:16:18 +0000

I am sure that many of you are aware of the happenings of the past few days regarding the outing of Dun & Brandstreet Credibility Corp. for buying links through leveraging the services of iAcquire. What you might not be aware of is the fact that Google delisted iAcquire.com, suspiciously looking like a reactionary measure that appears much more like censorship than a penalty.

There is a good bit of information out there regarding the whole ordeal, here is the quick breakdown:

Josh Davis author of LLSocial.com originally broke the story about being reached out to by someone on behalf of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation to purchase a link from his website. He did some very effective research and identified the agency/service working for D&BCC (iAcquire) and many, if not all, of their companies/websites that they utilize to reach out to sites to secure links for their clients.

The second step taken was done by Google, they deindexed iAcquire.com and all of the domains identified by Josh Davis. At the time of this post, I am not aware of Google presenting a case or providing any information regarding the intent or purpose of the response. It does not appear that iAcquire has done anything particular to have Google remove these sites from their index, besides the information that was released. More information from Search Engine Round Table.

Was this type of reaction justified or an overreaction from the search engine?

Ok, to be clear, I certainly do not condone the actions of D&BCC nor do I condone the actions of iAcquire or Josh Davis, however, the actions that Google has taken I feel is well beyond what was justified in this case.

I don’t think that buying links is the most valuable thing you can do with your money, nor do I think that it is the right tactic to employ, rather, I believe your time and efforts would be better suited in building valuable content that will support good inbound links. There is a reason for the old mantra “Content is King.” Put simply, good content earns good links.

If you are going to do something stupid, you should be smart about it!

The fact that D&BCC didn’t know what their agency was doing I either don’t agree with or at least they should have known more. The fact that iAcquire did this and specifically identified that they did not want the link or page to contain any disclosure of the fact that the link was sponsored was not good either. However, the alleged action by Google was not well played either.

Similar to what happened with JCPenney.com last year, Google took manual action because of a clear violation but didn’t drop the site out of search results, rather, lowering the rankings. This is similar, seeing that iAcquire was the one that violated Google’s guidelines, I would understand if Google reacted by dropping their rankings but not by removing the domain from the index.

I certainly don’t agree with the actions of John Davis’ actions in calling out these practice other than for his own benefit. I would consider myself a good steward of the internet, focusing on building value that is intent on providing a better experience for users and earning top listings rather than trying to buy them and I don’t condone these types of actions by others, however, even though it isn’t in the best interest of users, I don’t see that I should report them to the general population. If I wanted to do what was good for others I would have contacted D&BCC and iAcquire, not published their dirty laundry across the internet.

I am not perfect, by any means, but this isn’t justified in my mind.

Postscript – The Official Word from iAcquire

iAcquire – Did Google Overreact?
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Driven to Distraction

pittfall — Fri, 25 May 2012 01:20:02 +0000

When it comes to SEO there are a number of things that impact our abilities to provide true business impact. These are typically linked to whatever new or exciting thing that happens within the search space. With this in mind many of these new concepts are great opportunities for someone, not necessarily you or your site.

In recent years it has been highlighted by nofollow, blogs, XML sitemaps, local search, algorithm updates, mobile, blogging or even social platforms like facebook, twitter and even pinterest.

The important thing to remember is that all of the shiny objects may or may not help you support your online presence and increase your opportunity to rank for competitive keywords or even maintain your existing rankings. To maintain your sanity and keep your eyes on the prize you will need to have a strategy secured and aligned with your efforts.

Your strategy is the only thing that will help you see your way through all of these shiny objects and identify when tactics that are helping your efforts or hindering your performance. A true strategy will be supportive regardless of the new tactic, platform or algorithm change. If you aren’t testing new things and analyzing them to understand their impact, you are missing one of the most valuable aspects of SEO.

Testing the new additions to the digital landscape will help you find out when you should respond by entering into expanded tactics in new areas.

Ultimately, your strategy shouldn’t focus merely on particular areas, meaning you shouldn’t focus only on Google or another engine, as well as facebook or twitter specifically. Your strategy, to be effective will platform and sometimes even tactic agnostic. This is the only way to ensure your setting up your online marketing on solid ground, efficient and maintaining your sanity without too much caffeine with little or no sleep.

Cheers!

Driven to Distraction
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

What Do I Need to be Competitive Organically

pittfall — Sun, 20 May 2012 01:30:48 +0000

Smarter not harder
There are a number of reasons that you might be driven to distraction when marketing yourself or your brand online, especially when it comes to SEO.

In a previous installment of the Where should I start with SEO, SEO Profile Management, I recommended that you make a huge list of items included in your technical and code environments as well as your content and promotion activities. You can see that this type of work, you can very easily get distracted from being effective in growing your site organically.

There is one thing that you will need to compete organically:
Strategy

Now, there are a number of things that you will need to know prior to developing your strategy.

The first is answering for yourself what you are trying to accomplish. This isn’t rankings either, rankings are only a means to an end, your goal is likely to be to drive some increase in conversions. Whatever that conversion may be, this is likely your goal.

Before you can even analyze your rankings, you will need to know what keywords you should be ranking for to accomplish your goals. This is the next step.

Once you have your goals identified and the keywords you will need to rank for, then you need to find out where you rank and who ranks ahead of you.

OK, you know your goals, the keywords you should be ranking for to accomplish these goals and who ranks ahead of you for these keywords, now what about the strategy?

You will need to know what activities you will need to do to rank for the keywords you have identified. The easiest way to understand this is to find out why others are outranking you. Understanding at a high level how much content your competitors have that support a keyword as well as how many links these pages have from both internal and external pages to these pages. Doing a similar analysis of your site, you can see from a quantitative perspective how your competitors have surpassed you in search results.

Now, if you have followed my blog previously, it isn’t just a quantitative aspects that will help you reach the top of search results, you will also need to consider qualitative aspects. You will not reach top positions by merely by having the same number of pages of content or links as your competitors, you will need quality content and links as well.

Your strategy should contain how each of the items in your SEO Profile work together, how you are going to manage and support each of them as well as how you plan on continually improving your content and link development activities.

In the next installment, we will look at how to continue the work smarter mantra and get down to work.

If you have questions, feel free to leave your question in the comments below.

What Do I Need to be Competitive Organically
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Web on the Run – Why Your Website Should Be Mobilized

pittfall — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:15:33 +0000

People are constantly moving and they are bringing the web with them.

According to Google, by the end of 2011, 50% of Americans owned a smartphone and reportedly 89% of them use their smartphones throughout their day.

Is your website ready?
People have begun to use mobile devices as never before, supporting their offline research when shopping, enhancing their experience while reading, eating, watching television and even while in the loo (or in the head if you prefer a nautical term) highlighting the opportunity and threat that businesses are now facing: consistent and coordinated experiences during simultaneous interactions.

Google recently launched GoMo to provide support with tools and information to support businesses developing websites that are more mobile-friendly as well as keep abreast with mobile trends and Google’s mobile best practices. This goes beyond just merely providing a great user experience but also incorporation of best practices for indexation, accessibility as well as marketing to mobile users leveraging Google AdSense and AdWords.

Consumer Expectations
Consumers’ expectations are changing, they expect your website to load as fast as desktop versions and not only seek competitors’ sites, but it also significantly negatively influences their decision to recommend the site to others. Compuware Survey: What Users Want from Mobile

Mobile is Local
For retailers and those businesses that have physical locations, the implications are much greater as 89% of smartphone users use their devices throughout their day and 95% of mobile smartphone users have searched for local information while 61% call and 59% visit the location after searching for them through mobile devices with 90% of these people act within 24 hours of their search. Google: The Mobile Movement

What about Apps?
Mobile applications are great but consumers prefer mobile websites to their application based counterparts by more than 4:1 and prefer them more than 3:2 when purchasing as well as prefer using mobile sites for product reviews by almost 4:1. Adobe Mobile Experience Study: What Users Want from Media, Finance, Travel & Shopping

With the overwhelming growth of the mobile web and its impact on consumer behavior, it is more important than ever that your websites’ mobile experience is as good as desktop versions as well as coordinated with other marketing channels to ensure you are not losing your existing customers while it is quickly becoming another way to gain market share from your competitors.

Web on the Run – Why Your Website Should Be Mobilized
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

What Do Infographics Have to Do With SEO

pittfall — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:10:12 +0000

What is an infographic?
An information graphic or infographic (full infographic image here) is a source of data visualization and has become a popular new way of sharing information or research. It is a simplified way to present a complex idea or information through a visual representation.

Simply speaking, infographics are visual analogies.

What is so special about infographics for SEO?
Infographics, like badges, widgets, videos and other elements that have helped us to promote our websites by giving valuable or important information through a picture. This gives marketers leverage to share information and give to other websites to publish, preferably with a link back to the author’s website (yours).

One of the most difficult things to do in SEO is building authority, usually through links to your website. Infographics give you the ability to give something in return for a link as well as an easy way to allow others to share your information and link back to you at the same time.

If you have a great infographic, I would love to see and share your best work. Please feel free to share in the comments below.

What Do Infographics Have to Do With SEO
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

The Courage to be Unreasonable

pittfall — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:31:32 +0000

Google announced today “that part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience” and to “increase the privacy and security of your web searches” “SSL Search on https://www.google.com will become the default experience for signed in users on Google.com.”

What does this mean:
- People logged into a Google Account will be directed to the secure version of Google search instead of the traditional non-secure search
- Referral data for these same people will not include keywords that the person used to find the website in search results

So, beginning soon, your natural search data within your analytics tool of choice will not include the keywords that delivered a visitor to your website.

Why so serious?
Data is why we have come so far in the new digital age in such a short period of time and is one of the most valuable assets we have as website owners and marketers.

In the commencement address to University of Pennsylvania graduates in 2009, then Google CEO, Eric Schmidt delivered “The Courage to be Unreasonable.” Excerpts:

Information is very, very important. And, in fact, the way you should invade these oppressive regimes is through information. Then the citizens will take that information and turn their societies into better societies. This is going to continue and to continue and to continue.

But amidst all of this, some truths emerge. Leadership and personality matter a lot. Intelligence, education, and analytical reasoning matter. Trust matters. In the network world, trust is the most important currency.

One of the most powerful tools available to us is being shuttered in the name of privacy and security at the cost of a better network of information. Information is very valuable and Google and others appear to want to ensure their market security.

This reminds me of the net neutrality debate back in 2008 where Eric Schmidt also said:

In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online.

This does appear to be an instance that they are trying to do something extremely similar in the name of security and privacy…

Over my short life we have demanded more transparency from our governments and officials, should we expect less from our search engine?

The Courage to be Unreasonable
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Is Your Web Server Limiting Your SEO Performance?

pittfall — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:05:45 +0000

What does your web server say about your site?

There are a number of things that marketers think of when they are developing and implementing a strategy, what products or services are they offering and how are they going to position them for customers. A website is an important opportunity for business owners to interact, sell and service customers, but there are a number of things that are typically overlooked. In this post we will look at why it is important to understand how your web server is responding and how search engines react to the server performance.

Viewing Your Web Site as an Employee

The server that your website is hosted on, the way that it responds to request, like an employee in a store, can indirectly impact the ability to generate conversions. If you have employees, I am sure you regularly look into how people are performing in front of customers, but do you do the same for your web site?

Continuing down this analogy, search engine crawlers are like secret shoppers, they take notes about the experience in the store, their experience with employees and the shopping experience (i.e. what they could find within the store). The only difference is that this report is not given to the owner (some insights can be ascertained in various webmaster portals) and this is just one of the things that search engines use in their “independent” findings that are brought in to determine the ranking of web sites for a particular search term.

OK, whether you understand all of the analogy above, the short of it is that your web server’s performance is really important to your organic performance, but it is typically overlooked.

Here are a few things to consider when looking at the server level:

Sub-Domains

There are a couple of things that should be considered regarding sub-domains. The first thing is that sub-domains are typically each is considered as a unique domain. This translates into each of them competing with one another for rankings, so if each sub-domain isn’t distinct enough, you risk the chance that none of them will show up in search results because you don’t have a consolidated approach.

Another thing to note, non-www, sub-domains set up for development, secure versions and other sub-domains can sometimes cause duplicate content in a search engine’s index. A canonical header tag isn’t the best answer, rather ensuring that every page of your web site has only ULR for each page and that every other version of the page (non-www, https version, etc.) is permanently redirected to the page that you want to be the primary page in search results. This leads to the second area that is usually overlooked, server response codes.

Response Codes

Server response codes are signals for a web server to notify another computer the status of the file it is requesting, it is just that simple. There are a number of server response codes that are important to ensure your server is sending the right signal to the computer requesting information, here are the important response codes:

200 – OK
301 – File Moved Permanently
302 – File Moved Temporarily
404 – Cannot Find Requested File

The OK response is expected for all files that the server knows what to deliver for a particular request, so when a file (web page) loads, it responds with this code. When a file is not found it delivers either that it cannot find the file (404) or send the computer where the new page is (301 or 302). If it is not found because it is temporarily unavailable, it should provide a 302 response and send them to a page that should suffice and if the file has been moved permanently, it should provide a 301 response and send the requesting computer the new file. Just like a physical change of address card you might file at your local post office (in the US) when you are moving, search engines take this information literally.

So, if you tell them that it has moved temporarily (302 response), then they don’t send users to the new page, rather, they continue to come back to the original page and wait for it to come back. In a circumstance that the response code is permanently moved (301 response), they will update their index sending users to the new page from search results and also send (some) of the earned value from the original page to the new one.

If a 404 response is delivered, similar to a “Return To Sender” for mail, they will update their index and not send users to the page in the future.

Server response codes can be monitored. There are a number of tools that you can tell you the server response codes for your pages (Httpfox, Live HTTP Headers, Xenu) and you can monitor errors by tagging your error page and identify requested file and where they are being directed from.

Daisy chains are also important to identify and limit. A daisy chain is when a redirect is followed by another (and so on). Too many steps, (one is ideal) can lower the efficiency of your web server and also indirectly impact your SEO performance, leading us to yet another web server concern, efficiency.

Efficiency

One more thing that can be very important to differentiate your web site from your competition is the speed of your server’s response. Unlike the items discussed above, this is a minor way to differentiate your site when it comes to SEO (more so for Paid Search as it impacts Google’s Quality Score in AdWords). But it can make a lot of business sense as well. The speed of your server can be directly impacted by the complexity of your code, both amount and how much it presented on a page by page basis. It can also impact the amount of information your web server is processing and serving up, potentially impacting the amount of bandwidth your web site needs and driving up your costs for hosting.

Why is it important? A search engine spider must process code (such as CSS and JavaScript) when it is presented in the code. By externalizing the styling and scripts, whenever possible, the spiders can get to what they came for, your content.

Improving your web server’s performance can help you set your web site apart from your competitors. Like almost everything that relates to search performance and SEO, the devil is in the details and almost everything can have an impact on other elements. Benchmarking will be important, improving your site’s performance should be considered as a regular maintenance initiative. This should help your holistic approach to SEO.

Is Your Web Server Limiting Your SEO Performance?
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Online Shopping Gets Local

pittfall — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 22:35:08 +0000

The Internet has long been a source of research for finding or learning about products. It has always been a way to find things and even purchase something that you don’t have access in a local store. Many have stopped looking at local stores and only purchase what they need online.

Now, Google has combined their Shopping search functionality with Local search, bringing in availability in local stores into what you are researching online.

This presents a challenge to retailers that have no presence online and it also presents a challenge for those retailers that have no presence offline.

There are a number of ways this is impacting search results:

Google Universal search results with a geo-modifier and Google Maps
This is a typical listing that you will find in regular search results when you put in a zip code or city location with a keyword. The teardrop icons marking positions on the map. This remains relatively unchanged.

Universal search results without a geo-modifier and Google Shopping
This is a typical listing found in universal search results within Google when a specific product or product category is searched for. You can see the links “nearby stores” when a product listed is matched up in Google Shopping and Google Places Feeds that has been recently added.

Localized shopping results
This is new when a person is searching within Google Shopping and a product is available locally as defined by a Google Merchant Center Feed. This new feature helps to guide a customer online to a local store.

Earlier this year, the big three independently confirmed that over 20% of all searches online have local intent. Now, eMarketer is stating that this year, 46% of retail sales will be influenced by the web, moving to 53% by 2014 – but more than 90% of total retail transactions will occur in-store.

Local is one of many differentiators that can help Google and other search engines can use to provide more relevant results, but if you are not present in local search results or don’t have local stores, you need to have an extremely effective online marketing strategy to ensure you can weather the storm that is coming – Local Search.

Online Shopping Gets Local
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Insights that Lead to Success in SEO – Part 2

pittfall — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 01:14:39 +0000

In the first installment, I looked at tools that will help provide insights into finding the right keywords to optimize for that will lead to success in SEO. Now we will look at other tools and information to refine and/or expand your keyword list giving you additional insights to build and maintain a successful SEO campaign.

Some of these tools are not available to everyone, but these can give you great information to validate your insights and provide you the necessary information to both measure and improve your site to gain SEO success.

Tools to Refine a Keyword List

Website Analytics
If you can’t afford or don’t have access to reporting from an analytics package such as Coremetrics, Omniture or Webtrends, you can still include analytics on your website from the likes of Google, Yahoo or some limited analytics in Bing Webmaster Tools (it is unknown if Yahoo will continue, if Bing will build their own or if Yahoo’s will become Bing analytics). If you have access, the analytics information will help you see what keywords are bringing in the traffic and which keywords that generate conversions.

One more thing to note, something that is not available from free services (as far as I am aware), advanced analytics that provide attribution (basically, tracing the steps a person takes before converting) can give you the necessary insight to skip the “cut off your nose despite your face” step, by not understanding what step in the path to conversion (commonly known as purchase path), you might overlook some of your most profitable keywords.

Search Marketing Campaigns
Paid search can provide some really important insights for your organic campaigns. Not only what the competitive landscape in search is (likely to be as competitive or more competitive than the organic landscape) but also how productive (how likely is a visitor from a particular keyword is likely to convert) a keyword may or may not be.

This information is just directional due to the fact that paid search metrics (see quality score), ad copy (see dynamic keyword insertion) and landing pages differ from organic search. The performance of these campaigns or tests will give you insights, but should not be considered a one for one comparison for organic search.

Competitive Analysis
There are a number of competitive analysis tools like Hitwise, Forester, Compete, SpyFu and advanced search queries in regular search engines that can give you more insight into what your competitors are doing online, but these typically cost great deal or only give you limited insights. If you have access any of these or other similar tools, looking at this data into what competitors are ranking for, the amount of traffic a site is receiving, what other tactics a competitor is leveraging and such can give you the directional details that can give you a “leg up” on your competition.

Refining and expanding a keyword list is more difficult, but if you have more information in your analysis, you can find the best set of keywords to target in an organic search (SEO) campaign.

OK, we covered tools to research keywords and tools to refine and expand your keyword set to find the best keywords to provide the insights that will lead to SEO success.

In the future, I would like to dig deeper into standard and advanced analytics that will lead to attributing the actual value of organic traffic beyond simple rankings, traffic and conversions.

Insights that Lead to Success in SEO – Part 2
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Insights That Lead to Success in SEO – Part 1

pittfall — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 02:48:18 +0000

Gathering info is one of the most important things to do before executing an organic SEO campaign. It is quite often that some are shot sided and only look at what they want rather than the actual opportunity.

To find the most valuable keywords to start optimization, there are a couple of tools that will be helpful in finding the right keywords to target in an SEO campaign. This first post is about some great tools to start your keyword list and the next post will take the next step into how to measure if your keywords are the right ones.

Tools to Build an Effective Keyword List

Google Insights for Search
Google Insights is useful because you can see the relative demand of a keyword since 2004. You can even graph up to the last 5 years and even specify the country and type of search.

However, there is one important thing that is typically overlooked, the way that the data is delivered:

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

This means that it is relative to total searches, meaning that as the total number of searches increases, if the number of searches for the particular keyword doesn’t rise at the same rate, then the graph slopes down. This doesn’t mean that the keyword search volume declines.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator
Google’s AdWords provides this keyword research tool for people to start a paid search campaign but it provides good information that can be leveraged for SEO including global and local search volumes (local can be changed to a separate countries) plus the trend for the particular keywords it delivers. This also useful for finding new keywords because it suggests other related keywords and also categorizes the keywords.

The down site is that most just look at the default option which is broad match type:

Broad Match
This is the default option. If your ad group contained the keyword ‘tennis shoes,’ your ad would be eligible to appear when a user’s search query contained either or both words (‘tennis’ and ‘shoes’) in any order, and possibly along with other terms.

This means that you are getting the volume and trending information for keyword strings that contain both words or one of the words that are reported.

Google Trends
Google Trends graphs the trend of keywords and even websites while allowing you to include multiple entries graphed together. This gives you the ability to see the comparison of keywords or websites.

However, the data is presented the same way Google Trends is:

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

Search Engines
You might not realize it, but there are some great insights that many overlook. In regular search results, you can find a couple of important things that can help you find the right keywords. We will discuss the competitive aspects in part 2, but finding related keywords are sometimes as easy as a basic search in your favorite engine.

Google, Bing and Yahoo all provide related searches that will give you additional keywords related to your keyword. Google even offers you other topics that are different but relational.

Building a keyword list is easier if you add everything during your research and boiling it down after you have exhausted your ideas.

OK, so we covered some great tools to use to research keywords, in Part 2, I will dive into other great tools, but not everyone has access to (website analytics, paid search campaigns and competitive analysis).

See you in the next chapter. Cheers!

Insights That Lead to Success in SEO – Part 1
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

Special Delivery – IP & User Agent

pittfall — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 20:20:13 +0000

What is IP Address or User Agent delivery?
Both of these tactics are blackhat techniques to deliver different content to different visitors.
So, what’s so bad about that? Really, cookies and settings used to store preferences and such that make a website more user focused, right?

The difference between giving users a unique experience and delivering different content is that this is used as a technique to give search engine crawlers different content and even different URLs for ranking purposes. The easiest way I have found to determine the difference between blackhat and whitehat tactics, the intent behind doing something. If the intent is to artificially improve rankings, it goes into my blackhat bucket, if the intent is to improve user experience, I would classify it to be whitehat.

Stepping into the gray area:
So, what about building a unique site structure like URLs that contain the category names instead of id based URL hierarchy?

This is ideal, but there are enterprise level eCommerce catalog management software that gives crawlers (based upon their user agent) a generic or optimized version of the site so it can be easily indexed. Why would this be a concern? Because URLs are built based upon the catalog’s ids and pass navigation history as well, making it difficult for search engines to find unique content because the same category page is found through multiple ways of navigating to them. So, they change the way the category and URL structures are built when the user agent is a crawler and block the “user” version of the site from being indexed by use of the Robots.txt. Is this really that bad?

There are a couple of challenges that present themselves.
1) Cloaking
By the purest definition, the site is cloaking because it delivers a fundamentally different website to a search engine than it does to regular visitors.

2) Natural Authority
Natural or organic links come from users that find your content valuable and link to it. This can be as simple as posting something in twitter, Facebook or in a blog. When a link to another site is found by a search engine crawler the authority for that page is increased, but in the example above, this page would be blocked from search engines. This will significantly lower the ability for the page to rank competitively because the page is not visible to search engines.

So, what if the page isn’t blocked to search engines? Now, there are at least two pages that are visible to search engines, meaning, both of these pages are competing for the same keywords. The most ideal way is to build the website to perform the same way, no matter the user agent requesting the page.

How can this be done? Building the URL structure without the navigation path is the first step. This information can be monitored through a cookie. Second step, building the URL structure with category names instead of category ids by rewriting the URL.

This would be the same if your website does the same thing based upon IP addresses. No matter if you feel that this is blackhat or not, it does not follow SEO best practices.

Special Delivery – IP & User Agent
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

How Do You Measure SEO Success?

pittfall — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:31:52 +0000

SEO goals differ, but most focus primarily on rankings in SERPs or only on increases in conversions and profit or revenue.

If you are only looking at one of these two groups you can be missing the real impact of SEO!

SEO activities focus on improving search engine rankings by optimizing content and building links, but most miss the mark by only focusing on the first step to business impact, rankings. Some goals go a little farther by actually looking at the number of visitors the ranking improvements generate. This is one of the greatest reasons that many don’t consider SEO a marketing channel.

I am not saying rankings are not important, rather they are just the first step in the process and measuring the traffic only gets you half way there. True, a website will have to rank for important keywords that drive traffic, but this measuring the conversions of that traffic and the subsequent revenue and profits are the reason for being in business in the first place.

A few months ago, I presented my approach to addressing SEO concerns called FIRM, this is a method to approach different tactics that you are using to improve or correct SEO impact on a website. Measurement was the final step in the method and one of the most critical, because if you don’t measure the impact, how do you know if it was worth the effort? Now, you know what you should be measuring and the appropriate order.

You can get the cart before the horse and just measure increases in conversions and revenue or profit, but this too is missing the important leading indicators that will get you what you came for. These are not the only indications of success, but all of the other tactics should feed into these as this is what you can use to find out if the work you are doing is paying off. One additional thing, if you aren’t measuring the rankings and traffic as closely as you are conversions and profit, you may not realize that your work is beginning to pay off.

How Do You Measure SEO Success?
Copyright © 2004-2013, by Stephen Pitts aka SEOpittfall, All Rights Reserved.

The Pitfalls of SEO – SEO Simplified

pittfall — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 04:38:57 +0000

Sometimes it is easy to get lost in the details of SEO.

This is a simple game. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball. You got it?
- Bull Durham

Don’t get me wrong, SEO does require some advanced techniques to compete in most of the top areas, but it does boil down to a couple of important aspects to be effective in performing in organic search.

Here is the easiest way I have found to explain the basics of SEO:
Content = Relevance
Links = Authority
Authority + Relevance = Rankings
Rankings = Market Share

This doesn’t address the foundation of online marketing which is the site and all of the technical concerns that need to be addressed, but most of the typical technical concerns only need to be addressed initially and monitored. Like baseball, SEO comes down to the fundamentals which are content and links, then it comes down to practice, practice, practice.

The other important thing to remember when playing baseball or optimizing a site for search rankings, you need a great team that knows how to work together to stay in the game.

The Pitfalls of SEO – Keywords

pittfall — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:59:31 +0000

Keywords – Tools to Online Success

Many of us in the online marketing community look at keywords as a synonym of a real key that “unlocks” traffic, however, I rather like to look at keywords as actual tools that gives your website the ability to open more than just doorways to additional traffic. Let me explain:

Keywords, similar to screwdrivers, don’t always fit the screw that you have sitting in front of you. Similarly, targeted keywords aren’t always going to perfectly fit every user’s request. Search engines are looking to find the “best fit” from the tools that are in their “proverbial” chests. To that point, semantics are becoming more important than the actual keyword you are targeting. For this reason, it is extremely difficult to be semantically related to a particular topic with minor amounts of content, not meaning you have to provide a dissertation about “pink slippers” or anything, but a reasonable amount of content (a paragraph of content) should be included for each keyword targeted on a page.

Semantics are becoming more important in SERPs, as specific keywords are being replaced by context and topical themes (more information about semantic units). Why are semantic relevance becoming more important? Simply, it makes sense for the benefit of users.

Here is a case in point:
“football magazine article” in Google – 5,030 results
football magazine article in Google – 59,100,00 results

What I am not saying is that you shouldn’t optimize content for head terms, however, it isn’t reasonable to think that optimization of a particular keyword can only contain that particular keyword. Google sees that there are more than 59 million results that are relevant to football magazine article, but it is only specifically contained in just over five thousand pages on the web. So, there are approximately 1,000 times that, that are relevant to the keyword query.

Incorporating user-centric content optimization, does not mean having the keyword a user searches for on your page, rather, it does mean that your content is relevant and addresses the intent of the search. If I am looking for those “pink slippers” for my daughter for a gift, I really don’t care to have missed out on the sites that call the color of their slippers coral, fuchsia, raspberry, rose or even salmon. Makes sense, right?

On the horizon, Google caffeine (not available at this time), appeared that it gave a reasonable advantage to websites that were more semantically related to a keyword phrase than to a specific keyword. It appears that sources are indicating that Google may be implementing caffeine now, ~~just before the 2009 holiday season.~~ or after the holiday season.

Link Building Via Content Development

pittfall — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:41:07 +0000

Maybe you have heard some of the cliches about content:

If you build it they will come!
Content is King!

Really?
Yes, it is true.

However, what most of the people that use these and other cliches about content development and link acquisition fail to share the details about what content development can directly impact link building.

Great content is valuable to others and users and webmasters will link to content that is useful, but in a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg, how do these users and webmasters find your great content to link to, if they cannot find it?

Thinking outside of the box is extremely important to get momentum rolling for a website to start ranking and being found and this is especially important for link development. So, where do you start? Well, thinking outside of the box is extremely difficult, however, defining what the box is can be a great first step. Defining the box might be different for you than others because of the category or vertical you are in and what your competitors are doing. The second, and most difficult, is to do what isn’t being done. I know it sounds simple, but it can be the most difficult. This is one of the biggest reasons that businesses look to consultants to get advice about what they are not doing or didn’t even realize they could or should rather than doing it yourself.

OK, back to the the topic…

I have broken up the idea of content development for building links into two very broad categories, on-site and off-site. On-site contains some ideas around developing content on your site or domain, but actually, it is what you have direct control over. Off-site, on the other hand, is content that is published somewhere else, simply, you don’t have direct control over it and might be more difficult to manage for optimal user and ranking benefits.

On-Site Content Development
Since on-site content development you have full control over, it doesn’t carry as much weighted value, but has the most long-term benefit. Below are outlets to develop content that can attract inbound links. You may have heard of them previously, but how you approach them can have a huge impact in their success. Potential value assessments will also be covered to set the expectations for cost and benefit.

Resource Documentation
Do you know what you are talking about? This is a very valid thing for a search engine to try to understand about your site before sending their users to your site. The reason? Because they want to send the user to the most relevant page because this makes a happy user and a happy user is a returning user. So, how do the search engines determine that you know what you are talking about? Content. Plain and simple.

Building a catalog of information that is relevant to a user will do two things, attract search engine attention and user attention. Search engines send users and users send users, so the way to best accomplish this is by having enough content on pages that you want users to find. If this does not account for the aesthetics you are trying to deliver, my suggestion is to include this information in an easy to find place (global navigation is a great place for an entry to this information). Remember, a good rule of thumb to consider is “every page is a landing page,” so, if a user landed on any page within your site, would they know where they are and are they able to easily navigate to any other area.

Quality content is quite often overlooked when engineering a site for SEO. Test your site, if you don’t have the budget, get a couple of friends that don’t regularly visit your site and solicit their feedback. The other thing, difficult to do but valuable none the less, is to look at each page of your site and ask yourself the question, “if this wasn’t my site, would I link to this page?” If the answer is no, then rethink it!

Blog
I know that so many have hopped on the bandwagon of developing a blog for their site. For link development, it is a great tool to attract attention from users that are more likely to have an online voice. Bloggers read blogs and write about blogs, so this is a good group of people to target if you are looking for inbound links.

Four concerns with building a blog for your domain to attract links:
1. Is your content solid? In other words, will it stand on it’s own or is it just a different way to pitch your products or service offerings? If it is another attempt to pitch your wares, check out other ways to attract links in my opinion.
2. If you let the cat out of the bag, be ready to clean up after it! A blog is a great tool, but if you don’t put in the time and energy required it will show and might turn your greatest advocates (and link givers) away.
3. If you can’t commit to the time it will take to maintain, build content that doesn’t need to be updated and managed. Build your content on your site instead of adding a blog.
4. If you build a blog, the likelihood is that others will link to your blog, not to other important pages on your site.

Off-Site Content Development
Off-site content development outlets, of which some will be covered below, have varying degrees of difficulty to accomplish. Some require a financial cost, but all require some resource, usually time and patience. As with on-site activities, the following topics will contain potential value assessments to help set expectations for cost and benefit.

Press Releases
Press releases are a great way to make a splash and start the inbound link ball rolling, however, like so many other link building tactics, don’t overdo it. If it isn’t news worthy (be honest to yourself), don’t put it out there. The other thing to consider is the cost. Yes, you can put out releases for free, but you do get what you pay for… just a consideration. Press releases have a way of being a flash in the pan as well, they can attract some attention, but the goal of press releases for link development is not in the release distribution only, it is in the hope that it is picked up by other writers and capture links from these sources.

Distributing content that you already published is not a good idea either, so keep it unique…

Article Syndication
The thought of writing content and publishing it anywhere other than your own site might seem wrong, however, it may get attention from users that might not find your site through normal search activities. Articles can also be a way of taking an indirect topic off of your site and address it without trying to find a way of forcing it in your site. Like press releases, don’t republish content that you already have on your site, it should or will be disregarded by search engines because it is duplicate, if you are lucky. If you aren’t, the article might rank higher than your original page. Not a pretty sight.

Guest Posts
This is a great way of dipping your toes in the blog waters by working with a vertical blog resource and offering them something they are looking for, quality content. If you are looking for a tough judge of content, a good blog editor will provide the needed feedback!

Quality content is a great bartering chip to offer a blogger, it can be a win-win. Be careful and make sure you are respecting the blog’s owner, author(s) and especially readers. I don’t recommend paying a blogger to write a review unless you are prepared to allow them full control of the message, link(s) included or not!

There are plenty of other areas of online content to attract links, I am sure you can think of one or two I haven’t covered here. But circling back to the old cliches, content is still king. Building quality content that is link worthy is the best way to attract links. Be a quality resource and you will be resourced. We have a saying about promotions at Rosetta, “You have to do the job, before you get the job.” This can also be applied here, if you don’t link out to other sites, chances are it will be tough to get others to link to your site. No website is an island.

This concludes the link building via content development, for now at least. The most important thing to remember is that content is what drives the Internet, images and design are great but if the user doesn’t see it, did it even matter. Build quality content, it is the foundation of relevance. If your content is need of work, fix it first before looking elsewhere for inbound links.

Next, we will be covering direct link requests, so stay tuned!

Here are links to other posts in this series:

Holistic Link Building 101
- Holistic Link Building Defined
- Directory Submissions
- Content Development to Build Links
- Direct Link Requests
- LinkBaiting
- Link Building 2.0

Die Duplicate Content Die!

pittfall — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:41:51 +0000

What does canonical mean?
According to a biology glossary from the University of Arizona it is “repetitive; repeating in different forms“.

So, what does it mean to online publishers?
Simply, duplicate content.

How does duplicate content exist, what is it’s impact on search engines and, more importantly, how does it affect online publishers in search engine results?

I know that many of you think that search engines are “all knowing” when it comes to understanding content on the web, but the simple fact is that they are bound by what can be determined by mathematical principles, equations also know as algorithms. Now, this mean that they determine things based upon these exact measurements, even when it relates to a query that is not mathematically based. The first level of complexity becomes visible… namely trying to determine a value for qualitative data in a quantitative means. This means that to arrive at a solution for a qualitative query they must convert the qualitative data (content) and the qualitative request (keyword) into a numeric value to measure them against each other, find the best answer (based upon their predetermined algorithm) and return the qualitative data to the user (results).

Now, we all know that there are a lot a metrics that are used in determining the quantitative value of a web page (domain, URL, location of page within the domain, relational or semantic value, inbound links, outbound links, domain authority, page authority, topical authority, content, domain age, content age and so on), but one of these has been a thorn in the side of the search engines and the publishers of said content, duplication of content.

How can that be?
Simple, publishers have wanted to make sure that the most relevant content is accessible to users, because when it comes down to it, users are the goal of every publisher. The same can be said about search engines. The user is the lifeblood of the Internet. Without them, this whole thing is pointless. The search engine want to return the most relevant results so the user will return when they are looking for something, and the publisher wants the user to find their products/services when they are looking for it.

This mostly affects publishers that use content management systems (CMS) to build dynamic websites from databases of product/page information (like WordPress). Now weather you are publishing pages with ids, tracking parameters, session ids and other forms of publishing a page with differing URLs you can “hint” to Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live Search which the actual original page is without having to define 301 redirects or risk loosing your tracking so they are less likely to index two pages that are essentially the same page.

OK, in an effort to KISS (keep it simple stupid), me of course, the simple answer to the three questions posed at the beginning of this post:

How does duplicate content exist? Typically from parameters being passed in URL strings or from CMS’ that publish the same page in multiple versions
What is duplicate content’s impact on search engines? Pages with the same content and different URLs may not be recognized as the same page
How does it affect online publishers in search engine results? Duplicate pages can gain value diverting the total value to multiple pages

So, it’s a bright and shiny day for publishers wanting to let search engines know which page is the most important and the search engines stop wasting space by storing the same page over and over again, right?

Not so fast!
Sighting the presentation deck announcing the new link tag, slide 8:

This is a hint, not a directive/mandate/requirement. Search engines choose when to use the suggestion
Far better to avoid dupes and normalize urls in the first place
If you’re a power user, exhaust alternatives first
Be careful. Regular bloggers/websites may want to wait for their software to be updated
If we see abuse, we reserve the right to react as needed

So, you will be best suited to find the answer to the real question, how can I accomplish what I am trying to do without impacting my rankings? Specifically, point two, avoid duplicate pages and normalize page URLs in the first place.

News about the new canonical tag
Google Webmaster Central Blog
Yahoo! Search Blog
Live Search Webmaster Center Blog
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Watch
Search Engine Roundtable
Search Engine Journal
SEOmoz
Marketing Pilgrim
Matt Cutts
Yoast – WordPress Plugin to fix canonical pages
WebProNews Video – Interview with Matt Cutts

Keywords – What’s Brand Got To Do With It?

pittfall — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:01:30 +0000

Researching and targeting keywords is the second step in building an effective SEO campaign after developing an online strategy, so what is the value of brand messaging within targeted keywords?

azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, navy, royal, sapphire, teal, turquoise, ultramarine
All of these words are synonyms for “blue”

blue bag
web search – 289,000 results
image search – 26,900 results

indigo bag
web search – 2,380 results
images search – 155 results

It might be easy to understand that it will probably be easier to rank for all of these synonyms for “blue” than for blue by itself, right?

So, what does this have to do with brand terms?

A seasoned marketing professional will be able to quickly realize that ranking organically for this group of synonyms might bring the same number of visitors and/or conversions as the root keywords, but what has a tendency to be missed is that branded terms, like “gucci” or “louis vuitton” are almost impossible to overtake in SERPs unless you are Gucci or Louis Vuitton and the idea that these branded terms must be reinforced through organic optimization. The way to impact the search volume for branded terms is more difficult and can only be accomplished through a branding campaign (online or offline).

IMHO, stop focusing on what you want to be found for (namely your brand) and start focusing on what your potential visitors are looking for!

As a consultant, it is my job to make sure that my client understands the difference and what opportunities there are in SEO. So, when it comes to organic, holistic or just plain SEO (what every you call it), what does brand have to do with it?

Relevancy – The Ultimate Google Killer

pittfall — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 03:54:00 +0000

A study recently compiled and released by JP Morgan, 2009 Internet Investment Guide, included some interesting insight into search, advertising and online behavior including a “potential search deal likely between Yahoo! and Microsoft.” Even as the idea that Yahoo! and anyone might happen, there is more important implications of the research data that isn’t as implicit.

The Research
The reason that I look to research like this one, it comes from a source that isn’t usually known for their research in the digital vertical, however is from a quality source for information, especially about business impacts.

OK, first up is the search market share for the US in September 2008. Not a stretch to see Google holding the lion’s share with almost 2/3 of the market, with Yahoo! and MSN far behind with almost 30% of what is left.

Seeing the same data from December 2007, just nine months earlier. Google improved by 4.5%, 0.5% improvement per month, the also shows declines for Yahoo! and MSN, not a surprise right? It also shows that Ask and AOL also declined, showing how Google is not only winning market share from just one or two search engines, but from each engine that is in the marketplace. Both of these were estimations of JP Morgan and ComScore.

Further research was conducted by JP Morgan in November, interviewing actual users to better understand their online behavior:

Looking at the data, it is pretty consistent with the other research with ComScore, but it actually broke out each engine’s market share and went beyond just the top five, including “Other” and “Don’t Use / Don’t Know,” which actually considers the users that don’t actually use search engines. I know, but they are still out there, believe it or not!

Yeah, yeah, I know… I haven’t gotten to the point, right?

OK, so why is relevancy, The Ultimate Google Killer?

First, the poll data:

Now, looking at the information, it shows some important things to consider:

The factors that users noted could get them to switch search engines

Only 38% of users are pleased with the the search engine they use
Only 11% are actually looking for universal style search results
Over 26% want simpler, easy to use functionality
Almost 28% are looking for faster results
Over 22% want to preview websites within the results
45% of users say that relevancy would likely lead them to switch

The key to taking down the Google giant is in their hands… namely relevancy, not cost control, simply relevancy. The purpose of a search engine and the bread & butter that has led Google to build the advertising platform that pays for everything is search and relevancy is what made it all possible. So, Google is in the driver’s seat and has the biggest opportunity to maintain market share but only by focusing on relevancy, not additional services that will put more ads in front of more users. Yes, I understand that you have to pay for it, but if Google looses focus on what it important, relevancy, it gives other engines the ability to compete.

Can Google keep up their quest for more place to get additional ads in front of users, or will the lack of relevancy improvement be the ultimate downfall of Google?

Bounce – Better Than SearchWiki?

pittfall — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:27:37 +0000

Looking at the search landscape over just the past few months, it can be easy to see that professional SEO is not for the faint of heart. Search engines are always trying to make adjustments to their results and offerings to differentiate themselves from their competition, just like other competing businesses. For those of us who are, dare I say it, blessed with the opportunity to make a living in this ever changing environment, it keeps us on our toes and forces those who are not in it to for the long-haul to find other means for excitement. Longevity in this industry doesn’t come from following the most recent fluctuations in the SERPs, rather, using these adjustments to better understand and test the fundamentals of optimization. Could this be why many blackhat SEOs appear to be turning into whitehats?

OK, back on topic…

Bounce Rate
A lot of recent speculation (supported by data) has surrounded the idea that bounce rates are ranking factors in Google results, or at least they are being tested by Google and could make a significant impact on the ranking factors for SERPs. There are also those who have tried to justify the bounces as SCASI (SERP Click After Site Inspection).

SearchWiki
Google recently released SearchWiki, a new social element of search engine results:

SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong.

Many feel that users aren’t ready for the new feature but were surprised that Google’s Marissa Mayer that SearchWiki data could be used as a ranking factor for search engine results.

So, is the SEO sky falling? Not even a bit!

So, which is better at giving users better results or are either really intuitive enough to point out relevancy?

This question is what Google and hundreds of other search engines have been trying to answer since the inception of query based engines.

Bounce rates can be a great indicator because it gives the engine the ability to see that the result they returned to the user wasn’t relevant for that user, it makes perfect sense. However, it does not take into account the idea that the page returned actually was what the user was looking for… duh! Now for other sites, like this one, the page given in the search engine results might be the most relevant page for the user, either by SCASI or other reason. Bounce rates, if monitored and addressed, can give you the greatest opportunity for improvement, but really shows a search engine that the page that they offer to users might not be the best page for users of a certain keyword.

SearchWiki could give great data to Google as to what user intent was for a given keyword query, but still may not give a clear picture of what all users are looking for. Other user regulated groups of data doesn’t return the most relevant results either, if this were the case, we would all be using delicious or stumbleupon as our search tool. This is usually because most users utilize search engines to quickly find data, even if SearchWiki does make it really easy to provide SERP feedback, it goes against the nature of search engines, speed and relevancy.

Aside from the fact that both of these factors can be manipulated, more so with bounce rates than with SearchWiki, but bounce rates can also return false positives. SearchWiki is less likely to be manipulated because the user must be signed in to a Google account to see or provide the data to Google, however, for a website with a large bankroll in a competitive market, like buying links or Google bombing, they could easily employ tactics of manipulation to affect the SERPs.

So, in my opinion, neither of these will give Google magical data that will fix search results and build the best results, however, both might give insight into better results.

What are your thoughts?