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Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Link Building – White, Gray, and Fade to Black

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

SEO Police This year, search has changed for a number of reasons, including the popularity of social networking. The SEO community is seeing change, and with change is fear, and we see plenty of talk about the effect it has on traditional link building. Two months ago, a heated battle between Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin resurfaced about outing and link buying. Some think we should police the competition, and some think we should get better at what we do and leave the detective work to Google and Bing. Either way, there is more than one sheriff in town, so you better watch out.

There is plenty of information available now that suggests that building links too fast can result in discounted links or reduced value. Link text is a factor too, and some of the self appointed sheriffs might be using the same tools they use for link research to find “spammers” based on link text patterns, and then they can report them to the G-Man. It’s very common to build links using directories and article sites as well as making trades. Natural links are often built with link bait or just good content (imagine that), but sometimes the need might arise for even the whitehat to bleed a little gray and buy some links. With recent changes, you could burn some links and some cash if you get too aggressive too fast.

What about the old fashioned spending spree? Well, SEOmoz used to endorse buying text links:

“… and the process of buying links couldn’t be easier. Inventory at Text Link Ads is of a very high quality, and the links often provide more than just a boost in organic rankings, but also some click-through traffic. The company’s dedication to service and willingness to provide exceptional quality links makes them my first choice for a link broker with every client.” – Rand Fishkin

But in September, they released their new SEOmoz position on link buying. No more link buying from SEOmoz? If they can pull that off and still be successful then times have really changed.

Not everyone has given up on buying text links though. SEOROI is still in the game and at your service for discrete link buying services. Some call it ballsy, and some call it honesty or transparency.

Whichever direction you choose to throw your balls, there is one thing for sure: link building, link acquisition, and link value has changed in 2009.

—David Blizzard

Tags: Blackhat, Google, Link Buying, Text Links, Whitehat
Posted in Link Building, SEO | 3 Comments »

SEO for Bing

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Do 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

Tags: Bing, Bing SEO, Google
Posted in SEO | 3 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

Tags: Copy Writing, Link Juice, SEO flim flam, SEO Medicine Doctor, SEO Scam, Snake Oil
Posted in Link Building, SEO | 3 Comments »

Is Twitter The Future of Search?

Monday, October 12th, 2009

After reading the interviews BusinessWeek did this month with Google execs I started thinking a little more about search, where it’s headed and what effect it will have on SEOs and search marketers. You get the feeling that Twitter has search in turmoil. Both Microsoft and Google are trying to cut deals with Twitter to license Twitter feeds. In the Business Week interview Matt Cutts makes a comment that Google had crawled BusinessWeek 7 minutes before he visited it. Sadly he tried to imply that this was unique to using Google, going as far as saying other search engines could be 4 or 5 days. In my research Bing has been crawling news sites nonstop for a while. The point is that Bing and Google are very concerned with real time, Twitter has proved that real time is where it’s at.
When asked about an option to request Google results for the last 5 minutes Udi Manber, vice-president of engineering and head of the search quality group, responds “we already have that” but in the very next breath he says it’s 24 hours not 5 minutes. It’s obvious the reality of Twitter’s appeal is on his mind. Does the fight for Twitter feeds mean we will see #1 and #2 results dominated by inane comments from Twitter in the future? Let’s hope not.
Amit Singhal runs the core ranking team at Google and in his interview with NewsWeek he does calm some of my fears but he also has Twitter on his mind. When answering the question “what about truly real-time search?” Amit includes in his answer “it’s not just Twitter”. Yes, it appears Twitter is on everyone’s mind. He does say that just because something is said right now doesn’t mean it should be put in front of the search results.
Who knows, maybe quality will remain the goal and we won’t see search dumbed down to reality TV.
What about Eric Schmidt? He has something to say about Twitter too. His concern is how to rank the data and include it in results. He makes the comment that “Twitter and Facebook aren’t the last things we’ll see”.
So what does all the chatter and concern about Twitter and Facebook mean for the SEO business? I can see a real issue if the search giants don’t have the resources for real-time. They might reduce the crawl on the small business sites to weeks or months so they can increase crawl times for popular sites to minutes. We might find it takes much longer to get a new site listed or a new design or content indexed. It could also be the next blow to quality. We saw what AdSense did to the web so I can imagine the SPAM tactics that will evolve once real time is indexed.

Time will tell, tweet on.

—David Blizzard

Tags: Bing, Business Week, Eric Schmidt, Google, Matt Cutts, Microsoft, Search
Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO, Twitter Your Facebook | 4 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 AdWords:
“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

Tags: AdWords, Google, Internet Terrorist, Politics, SERP
Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO | 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

Still think it doesn’t matter? Read How To Stop Google Indexing Your Site

—David Blizzard

Tags: CSS, HTML, Validation, XHTML
Posted in SEO, Web Design, Web Standards | 3 Comments »

Web Standards Again

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Greetings! Many times we have clients that have trouble understanding the role of web standards and why they are important. So I created this high level explanation that I hope will suffice. It is, by its very nature, simplified and incomplete, so don’t stone me to death. Here goes…

The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org) is the standards body for the internet. They define the standard “language” or markup that web pages are written in. All of our documents are written in the strict flavor of XHTML (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) 1.0 which is very intolerant of errors. Conforming to these standards has several practical benefits. First, the site is easier to update since all of the content is easy to read and logically organized. This reduces cost for updates to the site. The W3 provides a validator to check pages against the XHTML standard and report any errors that it finds.

Secondly, strict XHTML mandates that the graphical presentation of the page (how it looks) be separated from the actual content of the page. So there is a separate file we create called a “stylesheet” that determines how the page will look. All of the graphics, colors, and layout are determined by this stylesheet. This is a benefit because it makes for smaller, faster loading pages which can rank higher in search engines than bloated pages that are slow to load. It also makes it easier to update how the site looks. For example, as autumn approaches you could change the entire look of the site by changing the colors in the stylesheet to fall colors. This is much more efficient than redesigning a site in the old days when each individual page had to be changed at great expense.

Lastly, search engines look for unique, relevant content that is organized well. By keeping all of the content in a separate file, the content can be organized so that the most important information is close to the top of the document while repetitive elements such as the navigation links are closer to the footer.

There is a great FAQ on web standards and their importance at:

http://www.webstandards.org/learn/faq/

Good Luck!

—Alan

Tags: CSS, W3C, Web Standards, XHTML
Posted in SEO, Web Design, Web Standards | 1 Comment »