Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

SEO for Bing

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

bing SEODo I need to specifically perform SEO for Bing? After all, the stats show that Bing doesn’t have anywhere near the traffic that Google has, so why perform Bing SEO? I say don’t perform SEO for any search engine specifically; perform SEO for your website. All of the known factors for on-page and off-page optimization should help you with Bing, Yahoo and Google. I won’t even bet money that meta keywords are 0% at Google. Maybe they lied to us. :)

Bing might put more weight on one factor than Google, but SO WHAT? Optimize all factors and stop trying to micro manage a single factor for a single search engine like Bing. Quality titles and descriptions with keywords are a must for Bing and Google. It only takes seconds to add some meta keywords, and Bing suggests you should still take advantage of the meta keywords in this article: Put Your Keywords Where The Emphasis Is. They won’t help much, but it all adds up and you never know what the next algorithm update holds. It’s a safe bet that your copy needs to be at least 250 to 300 words per page. Link text counts as copy, but your page should not be primarily link text. Usually only authority sites like Wikipedia can get away with that crap and still be top 5.

  • Create great content that targets the audience that is most likely to convert for your product or services.
  • Make sure each page you create has a specific topic.
  • Use keywords naturally in your copy.
  • Stop worrying so much about some magic keyword density number.

Links are the primary key to search optimization even when performing SEO for Bing. A few outbound links to authority sites can’t hurt, but make sure they are relevant for your page topic. Inbound links from relevant authority sites is the “right stuff”, but you can get results with the proper blend of lower value inbound links. Use social media to put the word out and you should get some natural links, assuming you wrote good content. There are still some quality directories that aren’t filtered, so those can help too. Buyer beware when it comes to paid links.

You have heard this same information over and over everywhere you go, and it still holds true when you perform SEO for Bing. And yes, Bing is important no matter which stat you believe.

—David Blizzard

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Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »

What is SEO? Is It Real?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

To the SEO bashers, I present this argument: Some people hire a lawn service because they don’t have the time to mow their lawn; they don’t like to mow their lawn; they don’t like wasting their weekends mowing; they don’t have the tools for it; or they tried it and they ruined the lawn and killed all of the plants in the yard. For whatever reason, they pay to have the lawn mowed. How silly would a person look if they posted an article stating “anyone that pays to have their lawn mowed is an idiot”? They continue about how it’s easy to do, they have been mowing their own lawn for years and it looks great. They declare “Lawn men are con artists! I will even tell you how to trim your hedges, edge your sidewalk, weedeat, and prune your trees, and I will tell you for free.lawn man reading SEO book”

Believe it or not, I started writing this because I just finished reading “It’s All About The Links” over at SEOWizz. Ahh, the mind is a terrible thing. How did I turn Tim’s great post about links into a discussion about lawn mowing?

SEO work can be fun and educational during the on-page process.  Onpage search optimization is the act of optimizing copy and HTML based on a set of known and  perceived search engine guidelines. It takes a certain skill set to evaluate key words and phrases and incorporate those into HTML elements and body copy so they satisfy your target audience and the search engines. You can change your page title, description, and copy and watch your SERP position and sales pitch change. Don’t let anyone tell you it can’t be done and there aren’t known factors. Then we get to link building, which is a whole different animal.

Sadly “Links! Links! Links!” is very true. I’m not sure we should be calling link building SEO, to me it’s more marketing and should be listed as SEM. Finding the links that are providing your competitors with an edge or finding quality links that will improve your search position is a different skill set than on-page SEO. New rules from Google and “juice” protection from websites is making SEO link building even more tedious and time consuming. It is also raising the cost of hiring an SEO/SEM that gets results. Specialists who can provide quality links that will hold their value don’t come cheap. You can get your site bot-spammed to hundreds of blogs cheap, but it’s not going to help.

The SEO community has been labeled con artists by some, but these people are blowing smoke when they tell you all you need to do is write good content. It’s just not true. You might not be capable of writing good content anyway. You need good content and you might have to pay for it, and then you need people to link to it. The content on its own does not get you traffic, and nobody knows you have good or even great content until someone links to it. Sure, it can go viral but first somebody needs to light the fuse. Some of the anti-SEO crowd are giving advice like “just tell people about your website” (so they will link to it?). Well, guess what; you just committed the “act” of link building. They tell you to have your friends and co-workers tweet about your site and mention it on Facebook or in email. Guess what; that too is link building. Sure, if you have the time and will to learn then you can do it yourself, but most business owners don’t sit at home blogging all day (or mowing their grass). They have a business to run and they need help promoting their website.

There are the basics that should be done when optimizing a website, and it will usually squeeze out some competition. Generally, the basic onpage optimization with no regard for links will not get you in the top 10 if you are in a market that is the least bit competitive. Don’t get me wrong; you need to study keywords and phrases, because they have to be used somewhere, either in content, titles, or link text, but that research is generally wasted without quality inbound links.

Are you listed on Best of The Web?

—David Blizzard

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Posted in Link Building, SEO | 3 Comments »

SEO Meets Politics

Monday, September 21st, 2009

I check my email this morning and I have a link to a political piece titled Nowhere Else To Go and then I hit Twitter and I find a link to a new post by Aaron Wall about how the SEO industry went corporate. Aaron could have easily titled his post “Nowhere Else to Go“. The crossroads in these two articles are alarming. One difference is that you have two political parties that are the same but sell themselves as representing two different cultures and in the SEO article you realize we really only have Google. Some people pray for Bing or Yahoo or a combination to catch up with Big G but will it matter? Or will we just have two parties that play favorites to Corporate America while stepping all over the little guy and our Internet freedom? With Google we already have things like the dreaded eviction notice from AdSense:

“While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account”

You have just been declared an Internet terrorist, try to figure out why. If you are a scammer then you know why but what about all the poor saps that don’t have a clue why they were banned? You can’t get any information from Google other than a canned response on their website. Basically their claim is that they can’t tell you what you did wrong or everyone would stop doing it and search wouldn’t be as safe. What? Their advice is to admit in an email that you broke the rules and promise never to do it again. First you have to undo what you did that you don’t know about? Cop a plea to a charge you disagree with when they have provided no evidence.

A friend of mine jokes all the time “Google is the CIA“. Sometimes I laugh, but only sometimes.
Aaron quotes Google as saying “the reason that so many people come to Google is that for the last decade, we’ve worked really hard to protect our users“. Ahh, the infamous we only step all over you to protect you, there will be long lines and forms in triplicate but it’s for your own good.
Someone I follow on Twitter mentioned an issue with a key phrase dropping in the SERPs after some link building and I can only wish him luck and feel his pain because we have to guess what it takes to fix the issues. Once again Google can’t tell us what we did wrong (in their eyes) because we might stop doing it. I can tell you. You know what you did? You tried to compete with Corporate America, you bastard.

Now we have the Government asking everyone to spy on his neighbor and rat him out for anything “out of the ordinary” and we have Google begging the little SEO to rat out his competition. The weaklings will be indoctrinated and sell their own freedom so they can be “friends” of Google (or the Feds).
What can we do? Nothing, you have already lost, you just haven’t figured it out yet. You are still moving your chess pieces around but the big boys left the table a long time ago. They only play with each other now. Enjoy the left overs.

—David Blizzard

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Posted in SEO, Search Engine News | No Comments »

SEO and Validation

Friday, August 28th, 2009

I was reading The Truth About Validation and I felt the need to respond. First off, Tim makes some valid points but only if the article is renamed “The Truth About Validation and SEO”. I agree, if a web developer tells you that you can’t be much of an SEO if you don’t write valid code then that developer is a clown and should be ignored. If they are just saying that you are not a valid coder then that would be true. From a coder’s point of view they could go as far as saying that you are a hack, would they be wrong? That said, there are many other reasons to write valid code.  Some of the best SEO gods, gurus, evangelists, provide detailed change requests to web designers and this is often preferred on a valid site so the SEO does not break the valid code. Maybe SEO specialists should inform the client that there is such a thing as validation and let them decide. It’s similar to an auto mechanic letting the customer decide if they want a factory replacement part or an aftermarket part, is it worth the extra money? Determining that invalid pages are ranked high for certain terms does not tell the complete story but it does tell most of the story. What if a search bot reaches a certain point on a page that is so invalid it stops parsing? At that point the rest of your content would be ignored. What if the next algo revision applies more weight to valid code or is modified so that it halts when a missing end tag is encountered (is Bing already doing this)? You would have partial page results in the index which means you have wasted copy.  More important is the fact that invalid code might not render properly on the next update to your audience’s preferred browser. At some point the invalid code will probably rear its ugly head and then you will need to pay the piper to write valid code, or at least new code, so why not let the coders get paid for what they do?

We could argue that having a shade tree mechanic use bailing wire to fix a dragging muffler will allow you to use the car again but for how long? Yes it will cost more money to order the new muffler hanger and have a muffler shop install it properly but when you hit that big speed bump at the grocery store which one do you think will hold up? At that point did it really cost more money to have it done right?

I agree if you charge someone to do SEO work and you don’t write valid code then you aren’t ripping them off. What if you are upfront and tell them, directly, I am going to make the changes using invalid code, will they care? Should they have a choice or is OK to leave them in the dark since it is to your advantage?

One point Tim implied that I disagree with is that it’s more expensive to work on valid sites. It is much easier to work on a properly designed CSS and XHTML site than a hacked, table infested, monstrosity. We charge a lot more, well actually, we usually require a complete redesign before we start working on a hacked site but this is strictly related to design work, not SEO. Let me repeat here that I agree that validation has little to do with SEO if anything. I say if anything because we don’t know if any search engines pay greater weight to valid code and there can be a case made for a parser getting stuck or stopping after a bad or missing tag. Maybe not Google but can we guarantee this won’t happen with any search engine?

I give the thumbs up to valid code because without validation then you have to set some other standard for when the code is acceptable. It would be much more difficult to create a list of what code is bad or invalid but acceptable. Why not follow the standards that are used to design every web browser?

I also read “source code validation common sense” over at SEOBook by Aaron Wall. Wow! He really goes off and I don’t blame him but I have never personally heard a good web designer that is proud of his ability and trade claim that validation is an integral part of SEO work. I say ignore those monkeys but let the design experts maintain their status of elite, or cream of the crop, by writing valid code and proving they are at the top of their game just as you are at the top of yours. Here are some of the top reasons to validate.

added: I would be considered a hack when it comes to XHTML and CSS. If I perform onpage SEO I check to see if the client site is valid. If it is then I make sure it’s valid when I finish. Often I find errors that I have caused and then I have to employ someone from our design team to fix it. I have been known to render this site invalid just by blogging :)

—David Blizzard

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Posted in SEO, Web Standards | 4 Comments »

Does Size Matter for SEO Consultants?

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Bigger is better, right? Not necessarily when it comes to internet marketing companies and SEO consultants.  Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have a team of 20 employees to put on a project and a million dollar budget just for office supplies. But would the results produced for my client  be that much better? I doubt it. Two of our clients have had remarkably similar experiences with large SEO consultants and internet marketing firms and both have had less than stellar results. One of our customers discovered a large, well respected California firm and contracted them to perform search engine optimization, Google AdWords management, press releases, and other services with a large down payment and a healthy monthly fee. Several months elapsed with no results for the customer. There was no increase in traffic, PPC was going nowhere, and 1 press release had been issued and forgotten. The “project manager” for our client was unavailable by phone  and many times would not even respond to repeated emails. There was a response, however, when the bills stopped being paid.

Fast forward two months. The  client came to us  for “AdWords Managment only”  due to the state of the economy, a tight budget, and the natural reluctance to fork out more money for SEO services. In the past two weeks we have doubled his click through rate and now have a PPC campaign that is pulling its weight. As a smaller firm we are able to provide the type of constant contact and reassurance that somebody who has been burned by the big boys needs. Communication and realistic expectations will go far in any internet marketing project to help it go smoother and make the client feel like they are using their dollars effectively.

—Alan

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Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO | No Comments »