Between Stations » SEO

Social Media is Getting Out of Hand

Julie — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:58:37 +0000

Sure, we all know Digg. Search marketers have Sphinn to play with.

But every niche is getting their own social media site. A cyclist? Become one of the three people apparently using cyclecluster.com! I’m sure there’s something for every niche either in progress, or coming.

How long can search engines pretend this stuff is relevant? It’s a lot like the proliferation of ‘SEO Friendly Directories!’ in my mind.

I know that Squidoo finally got a bit of a spam-slap. I sort of hope to see the same with a lot of social media. I’m having bad flashbacks to UseNet back when AOL opened up access to the real Internet, and not just their locked-up version of things, when something that didn’t suck rapidly began to suck.

Submissions: Snake Oil

Julie — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:47:52 +0000

One of the top questions I get from well-intentioned new site owners concerns search engine submissions.

“I got an e-mail from a company that says they will submit me to 181 search engines for $(small amount of money). Should I do it?”

Truly, these people mean well. They see a low price tag and think/hope there might be value in it.

I always end up having to crush them. Assuming a $35 submission fee, that’s between 8 and 10 delicious gourmet schmancy coffee drinks. Mmm, caffeine.

Submission to the top 3 search engines — Google, Yahoo, and MSN — is technically unnecessary, as they’re all crawler-based, but if it makes you feel good, it can be done while drinking one of the abovementioned caffeinated treats. Yum. I actually tend to recommend submitting to MSN, because they’ve been totally irregular about indexing some of the sites I’m associated with even when we submit. Ask only recently started allowing submission, rounding out the top 4 properties.

Then, let’s look at Nielsen’s list of the top 10 search referring properties in the US, June edition. Pretty much everything in the 6 remaining entrants in the top 10 have some relationship or data feed from the top 4. So, with the top 4, you’re really probably reaching into about 96.5% of households.

So, what to do with those other 7-9 coffee drinks? I typically recommend making a coffee date with your web traffic reports, once a week, for 7-9 weeks with the rest of the money you saved by not using a submissions service. Check your referring sites and URLs. See if you see any chances for inbound link building. Get all happy inside if your search referrals start going up. Be a coffee achiever.

New Webmaster Central Feature

Julie — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:57:54 +0000

Google’s Webmaster Central Team just announced a new communications console within Webmaster Tools.

I think for both agencies and little guys, this is outstanding news. I’ve said before that I think some bad behaviors by little webmasters tends to occur from good intentions (the road to hell, etc.). Having clear communications when these good intentions really do lead into hell will benefit the perpetrators, and hopefully improve overall content quality within SERPs.

As far as agencies are concerned, I already think Webmaster Central gives the agency a better view of what the client may be doing on their own, especially as far as ill-conceived (well undoubtedly well-intentioned) independent link-building is concerned. Having a formal communications channel when penalties or removals occur helps deal with client confusion, and to deal with the inevitable questions:

“You’re an SEO. Can’t you just call someone at Google and have them fix it?” (no)
“How can you tell I’m penalized?” (duh, check your traffic and indexing)

Ought to be fun to see how this develops…

Every Snowflake is Unique. Are You?

Julie — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:35:19 +0000

Perhaps your mother loves you. (I hope so; I hope I’m not opening any wounds, here.)

But here’s the thing: Search engines aren’t biologically programmed to do the same. In fact, they aren’t biological at all. They’re logical. Tech-no-logical. Robots don’t love you, no matter what watching Steven Spielberg movies, Star Wars, and Terminator films may have had you believing. I know this may be hard, but you need to separate yourself from your fantasies of Googlebot as R2D2.

There are many snowflakes on this cold, icy and loveless glacier we call the Internet. What makes you unique amongst the snowflakes? Do you have prettier edges? Are you more crystalline? Are you whiter? Are you the proverbial yellow snow that should not be eaten?

Make your web site reflect that, even if you’re yellow snow. Some people like that kind of thing — the Internet was built on that kind of content. Search engine logic loves that kind of thing: communities grow around the eating of yellow snow, links spring up, and you become unique. Uniqueness is algorithmically recognizable, and will earn you the closest thing a search engine has to love: attention and traffic referral.

Unique Value Propositions have been the basis of marketing for years. The internet has not changed this equation. If anything, it encourages businesses to engage in true self-reflection on what they can offer that someone up the street cannot. If that means pouring blue liquid on yourself and calling yourself a snowcone instead of a snowflake, that’s what it may take to drive traffic to your business, whether online or offline.

Black Hat SEO vs. Dunce Cap SEO

Julie — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:21:21 +0000

One thing I’ve found is that once a non-SEO (aka: a client) hears the term ‘black hat,’ all inadvisable techniques instantly become black hat — including keyword stuffing, white-on-white, even buying paid links.

I think even in the biz, black hat is an overused phrase. I’ve always assigned technical prowess and intent to deceive to black-hattery. Keyword stuffing is amateur-hour stuff.

Here’s how I would break it down:
Black Hat:

IP addressing
Cloaking
Squatting (where it requires server exploits)
Scripting exploits
Certain types of doorways

Dunce Cap:

Keyword stuffing
White-on-white text and links

The thing is, a lot of black hat tactics are either smart, or require some sense to make work. Dunce-cap tactics are the sort of thing anyone’s technophobic great-aunt could execute, and are dumb ideas to boot.

Personally, I prefer to be a tinfoil-hat SEO. The tinfoil protects my brain from rays emitted by Google’s Earth-orbit satellite data centers, and is a charming fashion statement in years where metallics are considered a must-have accessory.

Minneapolis Locals: SEO Event 7/11

Julie — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:30:22 +0000

The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association is sponsoring a good session on the Future of Search on July 11 at the always-posh Calhoun Beach Club.

The events are always well-run, the crunchy snacks are always crunchy and snack-like, and the cash bars tend to be pretty reasonable. The socializing is as good as you’re willing to make it.

For anyone in the area, it’s a good event to attend. I plan on making it, unless the summer sunshine beckons me too strongly to ride my bike.

Flash: It’s Not Just Search

Julie — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:22:54 +0000

The Google Webmaster Blog has a post about uses of Flash in Web pages. Naturally, as one might expect from Google, they focus on the ability of Googlebot or other spiders to ’see’ Flash.

Nothing’s wrong with this, mind you. Flash navigation is bad and needs to not exist.

But there are plenty of good reasons to use Flash. For instance, while it may not be spiderable, I know two sites where Flash ‘product builders’ are key drivers for conversion. Timbuk2, who make really great bicycle bags (and who’ve branched off into other bags too), have a great bag configurator tool that allows you to build your custom bag, see it, share it, and buy it. (I totally recommend their laptop bag, by the way.)

Similarly, Orbea’s USA site has a lot of Flash. But, they’re a brand play first and foremost. They are bikes yearned for by fanboys (and fangirls, hi), and aren’t going to be a primary (or tertiary, or billionary) choice for a casual shopper looking for help with bike selection on the Internet. Their bike builder tool is teh swanky. And that’s not a site that’s going to need lots of ‘how to choose components,’ since, again: the audience. We know what we like, and it’s shiny, light, and high-tech. Er, did I just say we? Anyway, a few runs through a configurator, then the next stop is a local shop who can help you fit and order a nice bit of carbon fiber with Italian componentry…

er, I digress. Again.

Flash can be a good part of a user experience. Not every site needs to live and die by spiderability. Should Flash be surrounded by spiderable goodness? Sure. Should a site owner decry Flash because it’s not 100% full of SEO goodness? Not if by adding Flash they can get people to drop some change.

(PS: Santa, all I really want for Christmas is Diva with a full Campy Chorus gruppo. I promise to be good.)

Political Search

Julie — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:40:26 +0000

Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

On Cats & Search Marketers

Julie — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:29:55 +0000

A study has found that cats sort of domesticated themselves because human granaries became a source of food, followed by the humans themselves encouraging the cats to stick around (because the cats ate the rats in the granaries).

The same is true of in-house SEOs, in my opinion. The magic of a lot of in-house positions, or ‘near’ in-house positions, is that it guarantees the search marketer a number of advantages: the paycheck always clears, the medical benefits resemble something at least ok, and it can be more stable than even a position at a large agency. While a large agency generally has the paycheck and the benefits, they also have a long tradition of dumping a lot of creative staff on the streets during lean periods or large account turnovers. Corporations are a little less prone to that, even if the marketing budget seems to be among the first against the wall when a revolution comes.

Beyond that, many SEOs just aren’t suited for freelance work. This is as true in search marketing as in other disciplines with freelance potential, like copywriting. Managing one’s own business development, client relations, and billing can be a drag, and sometimes just not in someone’s skill set. Sure, much of that can be developed, but not everyone wants to go to the bother.

Still, learn from the domestication of the cat: Your SEO team in-house is only so domesticated as you keep them fed and give them a warm place to nap.

Directories & The Sniff Test

Julie — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:04:33 +0000

I think any reasonably competent SEO has the good sense on how to tell if a directory is ‘good’ or ‘eh.’

Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a business owner in working with a full-time search engine marketer is that the SEO spends their professional life being a search geek. Most ‘normal’ business owners need to spend their time knowing the ins and outs of their business.

Here are a few warning signs about if that ‘directory’ is crap:

Are they indexed? I had someone ask me about submitting to a ‘directory’ that I was quickly able to determine wasn’t even indexed in Yahoo or Google. This is not the sign of hot traffic referral waiting to happen! The site: command is a good one for people wanting to get involved with their web site to learn.
Age of domain. Now, I know that a lot of normal people don’t know how to use whois, but it’s really quite simple. If the domain is fairly new and the directory isn’t associated with someone you’ve heard of, caveat emptor.
Request for reciprocal link. I recommend all suspicion of any reciprocal link request, but if this directory is prominent enough to drive traffic to you, why do they need you to link to them? In general, they’re going to have hundreds of outbound links, you probably have fewer. This means your link to them is likely more valuable than their link to you. So why bother?
Have you heard of them? If you haven’t heard of them, will your clients have heard of them? It won’t be a good source of traffic if no one uses them.