SEO’s prevalence can be maddening. Recently, a client’s design firm questioned our methods and suggested that they not implement our strategy. From the client’s point of view their concerns seemed valid, especially since the designer lists SEO as one of the services they offer. They suggested that below the fold copy with lots of keyword phrases is borderline black hat.
Yahoo and Google have worked out some paid search advertising deal, announced yesterday. They assure us that it’s not a monopoly or merger. I don’t know what it is, though. From the linked Search Engine Land post, it sounds an awful lot like everything will be run through AdWords, with Yahoo getting to keep a share of the profits. What I want to know about is what this will do as far as the Yahoo Search Submit services go. Are all of the Yahoo paid search services coming over to the Google side or just pay-per-click and contextual advertising?
Guess I shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself in what is sure to be a very gradual roll out that already has the anti-trust people in the Senate very, very interested…
There has been a recent change in the Google algorithm, meaning many sites have seen changes in the rankings for cherished search terms. After muttering about it for a couple of weeks, I’ve decided not to take it personally. We’ve been #1 for one particular term for years, so suddenly becoming #2 is not THAT big a deal–especially since the competing site doesn’t have anything like the depth of information, the links, the content or the design licks that our site does. After all, it’s the human who decides which site looks interesting.
And, it’s relatively easy for a site to concentrate on a single term to compete, but our methodology for site optimization looks at 25-30 terms. For our own site, there are 50 terms we monitor, and we have dozens of terms on the first page of Google…we do a good job of filling the niche we defined as our target. Over the years, we’ve been through several major algorithm changes, and the good news is that things settle out, and the cream still rises to the top. None of our clients has ever seen substantial change to their rankings, after the storm passes.
None of us likes change, but change forces us to adapt. High gas prices help us act on our conservationist values, and we suddenly understand the cost of running errands one at a time. Something we all need to do from time to time is to consider how Google looks at our site. What pages are being served up, and which are not being served? There are two major factors to consider: quality content, and quality links.
Take your list of targeted terms and take a fresh look at your rankings. Page one rankings are definitely keepers. Terms that are not in the top 20? It may be time to remove them from your strategy. For those terms that fall onto the second page, now is a good time to think about building them up–move the content higher up in your site, or replace some of those dud terms with these up-and-comers. Also, think about longer keyword phrases that you might have unique content for–unique is a high value at the Googleplex.
Are all your links pointing to the home page? Then you’re missing a huge opportunity. Keyword-based links that point to relevant content pages can be just the thing to pop a #15 ranking onto the first page–and since the vast majority of people only look at Page One results, it’s well worth the extra effort to sharpen your SEO strategy with quality content and quality links.
I’m taking care of a friend’s cats while he’s out of town. While I was leaving his apartment, a stink bug flew at me and attacked with extreme prejudice and unmitigated ferocity. OK, I’ll admit that it was probably just trying to find someplace to land peacefully, but my head is not as bug-friendly as it may look.
I began flailing my arms about in desperate defense, ultimately relying on the plastic bag in my hand as a weapon against this cruel stink bug berserker. You may remember that I am taking care of cats. The plastic bag, which I was taking to the dumpster, was not empty.
Back to work after Mother’s Day, it hit me. Does Google = Mom?
You decide for yourself. Choose the most appropriate response for each question below:
1. Establishes and subtly enforces — to keep things in order — a system of reward and discipline for a set of known rules:
a) Google
b) Mom
2. Establishes and subtly enforces a second system of reward and discipline, this one for which the rules are not disclosed:
a) Google
b) Mom
3. Encourages — through a complex strategy of intermittent delayed reward for compliant behavior — the habit of always trying to do everything right to be sure she’s happy:
a) Google
b) Mom
4. Occasionally must take away everyone’s privileges when actually only a few have been bad:
a) Google
b) Mom
5.Works tirelessly to survey, decode, categorize, store, and retrieve stuff — on demand and usually in under two seconds — so most of the time we can get what we need or something pretty darn close:
a) Google
b) Mom
6. Has earned the cultural endorsement of having a noun that names them be also used as a verb:
a) Google
b) Mother
7. Fill in the blank: “If ___________ ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
a) Google
b) Momma
Am I on to something here?
Have you seen this yet? Interestingly enough, the number of raw searches was up on Yahoo! and Microsoft even though their percentage of the market fell.
A media consultant friend used to have this sign taped to his office wall: “Never Do This.”
Below it were newspaper clippings of unfortunate things public people had said. An oil company PR person saying: “Only four hundred thousand gallons of oil was spilled and it wasn’t all ours.” An elected official defending allegations of violating a particular law, saying: “Uh, that’s not a LAW. It’s just a STATUTE.” At our SEO agency, we call it “Worst Practices.”
Last week, doing some competitive snooping for a client, I was at cache:www.competitorwebsite.com for the search engine view. It was the same as the competitor’s homepage - as it should be - with the Google cache box across the top. I scrolled all the way to the bottom, in my meticulous way, no surprises.
Then I clicked for the text-only version. Just what you’d expect - no images, same words. I scrolled to the bottom - oh my.
There, below the footer text, were several hundred words of hidden copy. About eight more seconds of detective work revealed the copy’s formatting code, the css class “se,” designated the right size, color, and presentation to be invisible to a human yet still be indexed by the search engines.
This is bad. If this were ok, web searching would be like ordering the fish at a restaurant that says you can order anything, but really everyone in the kitchen is having a fist fight to see who gets to come out to your table to take your order. The strongest and possibly meanest – or most desperate or corrupt - wins the fight and comes to your table. You’d say: “Could I have the daily fish special?” And she’d say sure, which one do you want: we have fish Brittany Spears, fish steroids, fish nudity, and low cost prescription medications with fish.
If you were patient, or terribly hungry, rather than running out the front door you might say “I asked for the fish special: I’ll have the salmon.” And she’d nod, and say sure, which one do you want: we have salmon low interest credit cards, salmon diet cure, salmon vitamins, salmon product coupons, and online matchmaking with salmon.
Vitriol aside, I was having a great time doing the email equivalent of popping in to everyone’s office and saying “Look at me at this, isn’t it amazing?” Our CEO then asks if that hidden text is on any of the other pages. I rush to view: source. Yes, it is. There is duplicate hidden duplicate copy on multiple pages.
Some of you already are sharing the satisfied elegance of justice, and for those not there yet, the punch line is: search engines despise duplicate text. When it’s found – and it’s easy for an automated process to find – your website gets penalized – those pages aren’t shown. SEO cheaters can be removed from the ranking results, aka de-listed.
So this website, while decently sized and showing signs of some ethical optimization, is nearly invisible to people searching. Whether a Google or Yahoo human picked up on the hidden text, or the automated process detected the collateral damage of the duplicate text, this site is suffering the consequences of its unethical SEO. We regrettably, and with a grimace of disgust, award this site top tier recognition in our gallery of Worst Practices.
Driving to errands after work, a story came onto NPR’s Marketplace that was so riveting I sat in my parked car, little heart all aflutter with hope at what I was hearing. See, Microsoft is attempting a hostile takeover of Yahoo! That’s not the fun part, though. Yahoo! is trying to rally by paring down to doing what they do well and outsourcing what they don’t do so well. Namely, search.
That’s right–the execs got together over the weekend to discuss Yahoo! outsourcing their search and paid search to Google. It’s like a Valentine’s Day gift from the universe to search marketers.
Okay, that’s probably not nice of me, but I have a major problem with Yahoo! putting paid results in with the natural ones and not differentiating them. Not PPC ads, but an additional service called Yahoo! Search Submit. The clicks are cheap, but you don’t have a say in what search terms they use to display these listings you’re being charged for. We’ve found that our clients are usually paying for clicks on their own name–positioning that they should have for free. There’s an argument for it providing a lower-quality user experience as well, since the results aren’t going to be as truly relevant as Google’s.
Why pay at all if the practice is a little bit sketchy? Because otherwise, it’s crazy hard to get listed in Yahoo! at all. Since they index your site and drive traffic there by giving preferred positioning, it’s not such a bad deal, even if it is a bit devious. To just have the second-largest market share of search become one with the largest would have us SEO nerds blissed out like you wouldn’t believe. Fingers crossed!
Search Engine Optimization is crazy. Learning about SEO can be overwhelming. Even if you’re only looking for a good SEO consultant, you need to know the basics. Optimization involves making lots and lots of small changes. It’s like being the general of your own, personal army of Oompa Loompas.
First of all, there are no mighty Oompa Loompa warriors. You won’t be able to make a few changes to the site and be done with it. You need to make lots of small changes all the time. However, if your site’s in bad shape now, you’ll need a throng of Oompa Loompas to fix the problems and create a strong foundation for you to build on.
But you can’t let your Oompa Loompas run rampant. Think of the chaos. No, your Oompa Loompa Army needs to be organized into platoons:
Keyword Phrase Research: This is your Oompa Loompa Army Intelligence Department. Their mission is to find the keyword phrases that people actually use when searching. In the pre-internet days, your marketing would bring the people to you. Nowadays, you have to meet the people where they are. Keyword Phrase Research tells you where to go, so to speak.
Content Development: This is your Oompa Loompa Infantry. Optimization doesn’t happen until you get the keyword phrases worked into the pages. By the way, you need more pages. Each page is like an additional Oompa Loompa for your Infantry.
External Links: This is your Oompa Loompa Artillery. Search engines want to display the best results possible for each search. The number of sites that link to your site qualifies you as having some value, especially when the sites linking to you involve the same subject matter as your site.
Clean Code: Ironically, this is the Mess Hall for your Oompa Loompa Army. Soldiers need to eat good, healthy food for peak performance. Likewise, optimized pages need good, clean code for maximum benefit.
Good Architecture: This represents your Oompa Loompa Engineers. Army engineers build bridges and roads. Your site needs a stable infrastructure. URLs should be free of extended query strings (everything after the question mark in the URL). Navigating through the site should not require the use of javascript or submitting forms. Important pages need to be “top level” pages (i.e., linked off the home page).
Oompa Loompa and SEO success is achieved by an overwhelming volume of small victories.
Why Oompa Loompas? Because they are small, plentiful, and they take the moral high ground on every occasion. It’s easy to find yourself in a gray area with SEO. The last thing any of us needs is to have a bunch of Oompa Loompas singing about some faux pas we’ve made. Oompa Loompas are here to keep you on the straight and narrow. SEO is here to get you more and better qualified leads.
A special note to our current and prospective clients: although we provide many search engine optimization services, including SEO copy writing, I am not one of our writers. You may see my work in parts of your search engine optimization audit, but rest assured that your audit and all of the copy we write and optimize will be 100% Oompa Loompa free. That is my personal guarantee to you.
Everything seems to have a small pool of people who do the bulk of the using. Whether it’s eating fast food or working out, there’s a loyal core. Who wasn’t grossed out in Supersize Me when they revealed that there are “heavy users” at McDonald’s that eat all three meals there several times a week? There are people who eat at Jack In A Box more times in a week than I have in 25 years. The advent of something that enables a certain lifestyle has changed how heavy users function in the world; it’s created a reliance.
Search is no different. The answer to anything is available at any time, any place. It’s changed the way some people operate their lives, how they use their brains, what they feel the need to remember and what can be transient. I have an engineer friend who always seems to have new gadgets, and he (of course) has a phone with PDA/browser/music/camera. He’s always online, Googling stuff mid-conversation as he thinks of questions about the topic at hand. I haven’t gotten a similar phone as a discipline to step away from the screen, not because it’s not something I’d use constantly.
I’ve talked about search with my friends (job hazard), and found that we don’t conform to the usual search behavior reported in studies and assumed when doing SEO work. Admittedly, we’re younger, more tech-savvy, more educated than the average American computer user. Nobody uses defaults, everyone exclusively uses Google for search. We don’t go down into the results if it’s not in the first page (30 results for me), but rather we refine the query. We don’t use information, we text Google for free to get the numbers and addresses.
When I write, I search words through the Answers.com add-on to the Google toolbar to get the thesaurus and make sure I’m picking the one with the right nuances. In conversation, when someone starts off with, “I wonder…”, half the time someone’s reaching for their notebook to find out the answer immediately. It’s a radically different way of life and operating. Battelle talks about this study from Complete in regard to who the big three have in mind when designing their tools–the 20% of people who do 70-75% of the searches, or the people who do a few searches a week? That’s the practical, business application, and an interesting question. I’m more interested in the trending toward the search volume of power searchers becoming the norm as the generations raised with technology come of age. What does it mean for information? What does it mean for search and the industry that has grown up around it?
