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Sunday, November 4, 2012
Sacramento FREE Search Engine Ranking Report
When I was a teenager in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I remember t ... http://p.ost.im/p/dBgTgS
Friday, October 26, 2012
Google’s Eric Schmidt Seeks Rapprochement With French Over Proposed Newspaper-Linking Tax
Google, which past French leader Jacques Chirac once referred to as a realtor of “Anglo-Saxon cultural Imperialism,” threatened to avoid hooking up to French news websites after French entrepreneurs as well as the French government sailed a deal to wish the web internet search engine to license their content.
Current French Leader Francois Hollande’s government is essentially attempting to tax Google to help support or subsidize the country’s ailing newspaper industry. Google has intensely opposed the thought of needing to pay to index and fasten to news sites like a menace for their “very existence.” Other European nations have considered or are planning on similar ideas to be able to support their particular fighting newspaper industries.
Google defended itself by proclaiming that it sends four billion clicks monthly to French newspaper and media sites.
Now Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will Paris to fulfill with French government government bodies to solve the issue before it further will get worse. France technology minister Fleur Pellerin told The Atlantic’s home based business publication Quarta movement they hopes it might be resolved and cites the 2005 Agence France-Presse-Google certification agreement just like a potential model.
It is not apparent, however, with what manner this notion will be a lot totally different from what's otherwise been recommended: Google needing to purchase newspaper content.
Because the US has a more “laissez faire” attitude in regards to the plight of traditional media as well as the marketplace, the Males and ladies tend to be inclined to intervene to guard newspapers particularly. Yahoo is specific because of its centrality for the online experience, its deep pockets cheap many in Europe blame the business for your predicament of newspapers.
Accordingly there's an easy method with that the recommended “tax” functions as approach to help newspapers and punish Google due to its success. Ultimately, however, neither side wants French newspaper sites being p-indexed.
In the bigger context this really is frequently seen as essentially the newest episode inside the progressively tense relationship between Google and Europe.
View the original article here
Sacramento Internet Marketing by E3 MEDIA.Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Google Tests Adding Analytics Data To AdWords
You’ve long been able to see AdWords account data in Google Analytics, but many marketers have longed for GA data in their AdWords account, as well. Google is currently testing such a feature in a limited number of accounts, as first noted by Periscopix.
Google isn’t saying much about it but a spokesperson sent me a statement saying, “We are currently conducting a small beta test to provide advertisers with more insight into campaign effectiveness.”
Though I’m not seeing this in my AdWords account, Periscopix says the metrics now appear in the Campaigns tab under Columns, where you can customize what columns appear on the page. In addition to the regular metrics — click-through rate, cost-per-click, etc. — the folks included in this experiment now see things like “Bounce Rate,” “Pages Per Visit” and “Average Visit Duration.”
The numbers would seem to be most useful to online publishers, who live and die by the pageview, but online retailers would also likely benefit from having this information close at hand. The data would allow marketers to more easily see, and optimize upon, these metrics that go beyond the first click to more in-depth interaction on the site.
Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: AnalyticsNew Alerts For Crawl Errors Via Google Webmaster Tools
Google announced they are now sending out Google Webmaster Tools alerts for crawl errors.
Google grouped the errors in two buckets.
(1) Site Error alerts for major site-wide problems
(2) URL Error anomaly alerts for potentially less critical issues
The Site-Wide Problems Alerts Can Include:
Your DNS server is down or misconfigured.Your web server itself is firewalled off.Your web server is refusing connections from Googlebot.Your web server is overloaded, or down.Your site’s robots.txt is inaccessible.The URL Error Anomaly Alerts Can Include:
Server errorSoft 404Access deniedNot foundNot followedGoogle said:
Since Googlebot regularly visits your site, we know when your site exhibits connectivity issues or suddenly spikes in pages returning HTTP error response codes (e.g. 404 File Not Found, 403 Forbidden, 503 Service Unavailable, etc). If your site is timing out or is exhibiting systemic errors when accessed by Googlebot, other visitors to your site might be having the same problem!
This is just one more reason to sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and enable email forwarding within alerts.
Related Topics: Google: Webmaster Central
About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry SchwartzConnect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn 
Monday, May 17, 2010
Google SEO Services Sacramento
Google Stops WiFi Collecting Street View Cars After Privacy Concerns
The Google Blog admitted that they made a significant privacy mistake with some of their Street View cars. The wifi data collecting versions of the Google Street View cars were not just collecting publicly broadcast SSID information and MAC addresses but they were also collecting “samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks,” said Google. Google said they did not knowingly collect payload data and when they found out, they immediately “grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on the network.”
Google added that, Google has made a decision to completely stop using the WiFi data collection technology with Street View cars in the future. Those wifi collecting cars will be taken out of the rotation and not be used due to the privacy concerns expressed globally. In addition to these steps, Google promised to ask a third party to audit the software at issue and conduct internal reviewing procedures to ensure that the controls are in place to prevent these issues in the future.
For more information about this, please see the Google Blog.
Postscript From Danny Sullivan: I spoke with a reporter today to explain what happened more, and I thought the metaphor might be useful to share.
Imagine that the transmissions you make on a wifi network to the sites you visit are like having a real-life conversation with someone on the porch of your house or the front yard.
As Google’s StreetView cars were like someone driving slowly down the street, recording all the front yard conversations that they could hear, as they went past.
Because the car is constantly moving, only a tiny bit of each conversation was being recorded. That’s the first thing that should be reassuring in all this — it’s not as if Google heard minutes or hours worth of what you were “saying” on the web.
Second, Google couldn’t understand all the conversations it was hearing. That’s because while the data was going out on an open wireless network, the conversation itself was encrypted. This is typically what happens if you go to a bank web site — a secure connection is established. It’s also what happens if you go to Google itself to read Gmail or use some other services.
In the metaphor, it’s as if some people were talking on the street were having a conversation in a language that only they and the other person could understand.
Third, there were some conversations that Google couldn’t understand at all, on wifi networks that had security running. In these cases, it’s as if Google could see that people were talking on their front lawn, but all they could hear was a mumble, nothing intelligible.
There’s no doubt Google has harvested a huge amount of data. Wifi “conversations” have been recorded since 2007, according to today’s blog post. But only snippets of those conversations have been stored, making the information fairly useless if it were to be mined — something Google doesn’t appear to have ever done nor plans to do, as it seeks to destroy the data.
As a PR issue, it’s a nightmare. Google just came under fire from privacy officials in 10 countries concerned about StreetView cars collecting photos plus about issues with the Google Buzz rollout earlier this year. The officials seized on two issues to claim that Google’s privacy mistakes were not “isolated” cases. Now Google’s got a serious third strike against it.
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Google Maps Sacramento
Google Looks To Improve Maps With 300 New Staffers
Problems in Google Maps are well known by now. From spam to bugs to its lack of support for local businesses, we’ve chronicled (as have others) the bumpy road for the number one maps site on the web.
Today, TechFlash is reporting that help may be on the way. Google is using staffing agencies to hire as many as 300 temporary staffers to improve Google Maps. The job descriptions come with titles like “Visual Data Specialist” and seem heavily focused on improving Google’s map data. Here’s one of the job postings:
Job Summary: Visual Data Specialist
Specialist will visually review images and complete specific feature tasks using internally developed computer applications. Role may include hands-on QC, training development and knowledge transfer.
Responsibilities may include any or all of the following: Quality Control all stages within the tool up to 100% of job:
* Launch computer tools and capture data with exceptional quality and accuracy.
* Ability to work on a computer for extended amount of time and stay focused on repetitive tasks.
* Run QA tools and answer key quality questions about images
* Data enter key metadata and other information as requested with high accuracy
* Identify critical problems with images
* Provide feedback and suggestions for improving application tools
* Validate content for accuracy
* Make outbound calls to verify data
Additional Requirements include:
Attention to detail and accuracy in data entry
Familiarity with computer programs, including browsers and other common online tools
Strong work ethic and ability to work with minimal supervision
Team player with exceptional interpersonal and solution-oriented attitude
Creative problem-solving and analysis skills
Qualifications:
High School Graduate, some college preferred
Strong English skills; ability to read and write fluently
Previous experience with computer or data entry and processing
Ability to stay focused on repetitive tasks
Ability to communicate clearly, verbally and in writing
But this appears to mostly be an extension of Google’s recent decision to ditch TeleAtlas and go it alone for Map data, both in the U.S. and in Canada, rather than an attempt to fight spam or improve service for local business owners.
TechFlash spoke with Google PR person Jordan Newman, who apparently mentioned that business listings will be at least part of their work:
Much of the Google Maps work will be focused on data management, said Newman. That includes keeping current on new business listings and the latest information on things like bike trails.
How much of the job will be focused on data versus business issues remains to be seen.
The temporary positions are full-time, pay $14.25 per hour, and may last for up to a year.
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Sunday, May 16, 2010
Facebook Social Media Optimization Sacramento
Openbook: See What People On Facebook Share To The World
May 14, 2010 at 10:08pm ET by Danny Sullivan
Want to see what people share on Facebook with the entire world — perhaps without realizing it? There’s a new site that makes this easy, Openbook.
Look At The Embarrassing Updates!
Last week, I explored the issue of how Facebook’s own “Posts By Everyone” search feature revealed people who might be sharing material they didn’t intend for the entire world to see. I’d strongly encourage people to read it: Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature: Do People Realize They’re Sharing To The World?
Openbook allows you to see the same thing without having to be in Facebook at all. When you go to Openbook, it automatically shows search results for “cheated test.” These potentially embarrassing updates seem intended to illustrate how those behind the Openbook feel Facebook has changed the previous privacy settings of this information.
There are two issues with that.
Some People Choose To Overshare — And Do On Twitter, Too
First, people share similarly embarrassing updates on Twitter with the entire world. My previous article illustrated this. It’s easy to find people on Twitter broadcasting tweets about cheating on tests, being hungover or that they “hate my boss.” So, Facebook is hardly unique here.
Second, some people are Facebook do deliberately choose to share their updates. They weren’t tricked into doing it. They deliberately selected that option, which has been offered for almost a year now.
But Facebook DID Suggest New Settings
Still, I have similar concerns to those at Openbook that people on Facebook may be sharing without realizing it, due to Facebook’s privacy changes — especially those last December, which may have caused some people to shift to sharing to the world without realizing it. And again, my previous article explains all this in great detail.
Who Else Has This Data?
Openbook is making use of data from Facebook itself. Last April, Facebook began allowing any search service to take in updates that have an “everyone” setting. Of the real time search engines out there, OneRiot has trumpeted its use of Facebook search data the most, with a blog announcement at the end of April. However, OneRiot is designed to show the hottest links that are shared on social networks, not to find actual updates that are issued.
In contrast, a place like Google Real-Time Search is expressly designed to show updates. Currently, Google will show updates that are made to Facebook fan pages (see Google Real Time Search Now Shows Updates From Facebook Fan Pages). But Google’s deal with Facebook did not allow for it to pull in personal updates, as is the case with Bing (see Google & Bing’s Unequal Facebook Status Update Deals).
Now that anyone can search against personal updates from Facebook, potentially Google could start showing these. But I did a test, and I don’t see them showing yet. I also suspect that Google might not be able to use the standard search “API” interface to pull results, because it has so many searches that it might overwhelm this.
Bing hasn’t yet launched a way to search for Facebook updates, be they on fan pages or personal ones. But since it has a deal allowing searching against both types, that’s something I expect will come.
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Saturday, May 15, 2010
Search Engine Optimization SEO Sacramento
SEO Is Not Free Traffic
100% Organic - A Column From Search Engine Land
One of the first jobs I have to do as a consultant going into an SEO engagement is to debunk the myth that SEO is “free.” SEO has never been, nor will it ever be, free traffic. It takes work, and that comes at a cost. You need to hire staff or allocate internal resources to manage your SEO efforts. You need to enlist an SEO firm or consultant to help identify the opportunities and prioritize them, navigate the minefields, and up-skill your internal team. You need to outfit your in-house team with on the tools of the trade (SEOmoz Pro, Internet Marketing Ninjas, etc.), send them to the conferences (all the SMX conferences, of course!), provide them with training intensives (e.g., SEOClass, SEOTraining), and various other professional development and networking opportunities.
If you are paying an SEO firm or contractor, the cost is obvious. But the time you allocate your internal folks to SEO — and this includes the IT team, web designers, copywriters, project managers, as well as in-house SEO specialists — must be quantified and factored in, too. Then there are the “soft” costs that are harder to measure, including:
* The missed opportunity cost — Failing to optimize everything leads to lost sales. It’s hard to know how much, and which things accounted for what. John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half!”. According to an iProspect study, over 66 percent of SEO recommendations go unimplemented a year later. What if that 66 percent represented the good half that John Wanamaker alluded to!
* The time-to-market cost — They say all good things take time, but the inordinate amount of time it takes for large companies to implement SEO initiatives equates to a serious amount of lost traffic. A major online retailer of outdoor gear spent over 1000 hours of IT time implementing URL rewrites and they couldn’t even finish implementing them all! How would you know this in advance? It’s really tough. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could flip a switch and be optimized?
* The cost of competing priorities — By asking your IT team to dedicate time to extensive SEO initiatives, you change their focus. What if one of their other — now displaced — priorities was more mission critical to the business than you or they realized? Having them take their eye off the ball could lead to disastrous consequences.
This all sounds very fuzzy, doesn’t it? Hard to quantify, hard to prove in advance. This is SEO’s “Achilles heel,” and why paid search usually wins over natural search in the budget battles, receiving the lion’s share of the search marketing budget. This is a travesty, considering the searcher’s primary focus on the natural results and the fact that a searcher interprets a natural listing as an implied endorsement by the search engine.
The allure of paid search is strong in part because of its predictability, but I’m convinced that natural search trumps paid search in overall opportunity. And besides, with paid search, the moment you stop paying is the moment you stop receiving the traffic. Stop investing in SEO and the traffic drop-off will come too, but it won’t be as dramatic and sudden as for paid search.
With uncertainty comes risk, and your natural rankings are full of uncertainty, and therefore risk. There’s no guarantee that a dollar invested into SEO will net 10 or 20 dollars in return. So take heed, SEO firms: de-risk your SEO offering and you will have the secret to success. Granted, you can’t control the engines’ natural ranking algorithms; however, you can introduce more predictability and accountability into your SEO. But it’s going to cost you. And it may require a paradigm shift, to a pay-for-performance pricing model for SEO services. SEO firms are starting to embrace alternative payment models, as evidenced by the session on this topic coming to SMX Advanced in June. Indeed, we at Netconcepts have performance-based pricing for our GravityStream technology platform — natural search traffic on a cost-per-click basis.
After expending some serious effort and cash too, you may finally find yourself ranking for some highly competitive terms, receiving traffic that you aren’t “paying for” like you would be for paid search. However, getting there was not free, and guess what? — neither is staying there. Now that you have that top spot, you have to keep it — against others who are forever trying to outrank you. This is especially true if the words you are ranking for are competitive. You are still going to need someone to build links for you and keep up with the changing SEO landscape and search engine algorithm updates.
Wouldn’t it be great if natural search traffic were free and never ending? Like manna from Heaven… Yet, SEO requires continuing investment. Invest in SEO as an ongoing marketing channel and your natural rankings will surely rise over time. Treat SEO as a one-time project, or dedicate insufficient resources, and you court obsolescence.
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Social Media Optimization SEO Sacramento
Radical User Intelligence: Moving Past Keyword Research
Marketers have been advising strategy and tactics by “search” keyword research for well over a decade. We pretty much all know by now that keyword “inventory” has various tails including search frequency (number of searches), seasonality (when), cost-per-paid-click, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), SEO attainability, geo-location and user-intent (query objective). All these years later search seems only slightly less amazing. No matter what comes next, there will probably always be awesome power in search, targeting users’ questions by tailed keywords.
That said, demographic research has come a long way in the last couple of years. With nary 24 million members in 2007, Facebook rode shotgun down the avalanche, with the little-lauded launch of Facebook DIY contextual ad platform. Those in the know whispered about an impending social PPC revolution. Some guessed right and began segmenting landing pages by social segment as well as search AdGroups.
Search vs. contextual
To keep terms straight, “contextual” means it is not search. Nobody is typing a question in a box for contextual targeting. Contextual is walk-by traffic targeted to interests, behavior and a number of other attributes on the social graph. Google’s storied content network is a great example of a contextual marketplace, as are Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn direct ads. By late 2007 Facebook wasn’t only for kids anymore. Three years ago there were tens of thousands of Facebook users; over 30 years old, “interested” in “Las Vegas” and other B2B segments were beginning to emerge.
Now that Facebook has (allegedly) spit in users’ faces and whored away the store, marketers can really profile demographic segments by mining (arguably) invasive data we used to only dream about. Where I work we’re all for privacy but if Facebook is going to give us the data, then we’re going to respectfully market to users who give away the information. Don’t feel bad. By using Facebook’s software, users explicitly sell their data and submit to Facebook’s terms of service. Imagine the cost of building Facebook. The value Facebook sells advertisers amounts to blood off of users’ backs. Life is grand!
Not just Facebook
Facebook is not the only story for demographic profiling by any means. With some wit and creativity it’s possible to excavate user data from Twitter, YouTube, Google search result pages themselves, question engines, PPC competitive intelligence tools, Google’s DoubleClick demographic targeting layer and organic analytics to build a product-level grid of multi-channel social inventory that goes far beyond classic search keyword research. It’s not your mom’s keyword basket anymore, kids.
Just as with search marketing, contextual segments target users by both organic and paid channel tactics. Here are some examples of radical user intelligence. Look for users, who may well be susceptible to your sales and branding messages, by graphing the following.
Organic contextual
Remember, “organic contextual” is what most us call “social media.” We market by participation and make friends by sharing in community activities. “Sharing” can mean deep research at the users-level, in order to identify crucial users who would consume or otherwise champion what you’re selling. How to do this?
* Networking in YouTube in support of content
* Twitter conversations (graph them as conversations-per-day)
* Making friends in any channel without paying to meet them
* Facebook SEO: Optimizing Facebook groups, fan pages, events, people and apps’ for discoverability by Facebook’s internal search engine
* Participating in LinkedIn and Yahoo Answers
* Finding Twitter friends using Twitter search on hashtags and/or keywords
Paid contextual
Examples of paid contextual channels include:
* Mainstream search engine content networks, like Google’s and Yahoo’s
* Banners served to Yahoo personals and focused Gmail advertising
* Facebook DIY PPC platform
* Paid tweets
* Direct banner buys which match up publishers” content with the content of your ad
The real power for the radical demographic research artist is learning to turn available contextual research tools into finely tuned utensils to follow lines of investigation. Just as with paid search inventory tools (the Google keyword tool, Trellian keyword discovery, WordTracker, etc), there are rich insights to be gained from paid contextual inventory tools. This is especially true of Facebook’s PPC targeting engine. Just as we use PPC inventory tools for SEO, we’ve found splendid insight in paid contextual tools that can be applied to organic contextual activities.
Here are some examples of contextual demographic segments we profile and market to in both paid and organic contextual spaces. These segment examples can be targeted by paid and organic tactics in nearly any contextual space. Take clear aim at Twitter hashtags, Facebook PPC, YouTube buzz, Flickr photos or conversations in any social channels. Advise the process by search inventory as a starting place. Simply put, target these users by conversation or banner, organic or paid.
* Brand + competitors’ brands and current and legacy SKUs
* Consumers and professionals who consume products
* Product categories
* Categorized usage of products by consumers and professionals
* Trade groups and associations
* Non-profits and foundations (interest tool)
* Employees of non-profits and foundations (education and work tools)
* Employees of companies that consume products
* Employees of competitors’ companies
* Application users
* Places of employment (interest tool)
* Places of employment (education and work tool)
* College affiliations (interest tool)
* College affiliations (education and work tool)
* College majors (interest tool)
* College majors (work and education tool)
* Purchased “friend-leads” @ CPFL (cost per friend lead)
* Converted friend-leads @ CPUF (cost per unique friend)
* Authority users/influencer-friends attained by any method
* Users who frequent specific publications
* Chatter surrounding well trafficked questions
The ability to map marketing activity to such fundamentally relevant social media user-segments—people who are unthinkingly going about their business in contextual space—seems to fulfill the internet’s promise for marketers in a deep way. With hundreds of millions of engaged users who reveal their affinities and predilections, it’s getting easier and easier to incorporate emerging demographic profiling capabilities as strategic and tactical levers.
As we add contextual to the search mix for online marketing, surely additional paid and organic models will emerge to elevate traditional keyword research to radical user intelligence.
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Friday, May 14, 2010
Seo Service Sacramento
I have to say I wasn’t expecting the impassioned responses to my last article, 36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To. But that’s okay, as I wasn’t expecting all the positive buzz and re-tweets either (1,153 and still counting — how exciting!)
In this follow-up, I’d like to revisit some of the most fervently defended myths, clarify any potentially vague statements, and provide the occasional caveat.
Myths are born when folks mistake correlation with causation. And when they make inferences and draw conclusions without rock-solid data or methodology. Next thing you know a “feeling I’ve got about this” is espoused as fact.
It’s the nature of myths that they aren’t easily dis-proven or dismissed. So the myths persist.
And as Rand Fishkin so astutely recognized, there is strong incentive for someone to defend a myth if they had advanced that myth previously to a public audience, boss, client, etc. It’s self-preservation instinct, to “save face.” Consequently, some folks hold on to certain myths for dear life. Their very careers hang in the balance — or so they think.
But I’m not infallible either, so I wanted to get confirmation from at least a dozen other industry veterans that I’m not off-the-mark. For the most part I received vigorous agreement. Adam Audette summed it up nicely:
I can’t believe the hornet’s nest you stirred up with that post! I was THIS close to commenting on that post, but didn’t. I was going to say that I agree completely w/ your list and that everyone disagreeing needed to SIT DOWN :) Decided I’d take the easy route and stay out of it….
A hornet’s nest indeed! Well put.
Rand did a great job debunking the myths where I faced the strongest resistance. I won’t recap and rehash all that here, but I encourage you to read his post.
In the comments of my previous article, I received criticism that I was merely providing assertions rather than citing research and disclosing hard factual data. If I fully backed up every point with enough research to satisfy everyone, the article would have turned into a 10,000 word tome. Fitting for a white paper or ebook, not so much for an article/post to Search Engine Land. As it is, this follow-up article, at over 5,000 words (divided into two parts), has exceeded my last one.
My choice of studies to cite was also brought into question. It’s always possible to find flaws and things to pick at in someone else’s study, but in my opinion, having some research is a lot better than having none. Otherwise you’re flying blind, drawing only from your own observations, conclusions and hunches. In general I think we’re all relying on flawed data. Would anyone’s SEO experiment truly stand up to scientific scrutiny?
There are so many moving parts — so many influencing factors — that we can’t control or isolate out of the system when conducting experiments. Search is in a constant state of flux — the algorithms, indices, competitors, data propagation across data centers, etc. Given this, how can one possibly create a proper control group for scientifically rigorous experiments? But we do our best. That’s SEO. It’s the nature of the beast.
Now let’s address some of the SEO myths on which I was challenged…
Myth #2: Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you.
I’m not one of those tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists, but who knows, maybe someday I’ll be sorry that I wasn’t. Michael Geneles says:
“I am definitely NOT the most paranoid SEO out there"
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Seo Service Sacramento
36 More SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To
Now it’s time for some new (old) myths to add to my original collection, with thanks to Lee Odden, Duane Forrester, Ian McAnerin, Tony Adam, Hamlet Batista, Michael Geneles, Jeff Quipp, Mike Moran, Adam Audette and Christine Churchill for their contributions to the list below…
1. SEO should be owned and managed by IT. While SEO implementation has its roots in the web development and IT departments of most companies, it’s a marketing discipline more than a web development discipline. Accountability for effective SEO might be multi-departmental in theory, but the reality is that most organizations budget, staff and manage SEO programs as part of customer acquisition, i.e. marketing and sales. Do not let IT lead your SEO programs. IT is the wingman for Marketing when it comes to SEO.
2. SEO is a subset of Social Media. There are plenty of intersections between SEO and social media, but SEO is no more a subset of social media marketing than it is of public relations, customer service or media relations. Working together, effective SEO can boost social network growth and social media can facilitate link building. In this way, they are yin and yang but not super- or sub-ordinate to each other.
3. Using Flash will tank your SEO. The cost of a myth like Flash being bad for SEO can be substantial, such as having a boring website that doesn’t engage visitors or attract any links. Flash isn’t bad for SEO, it’s the absence of text and crawlable links in sites that are constructed with a single Flash movie that creates problems. Some Flash content can be crawled, but it’s embedding Flash within an HTML framework that allows websites to have the best of both worlds: rich media that engages site visitors and the presence of text and links to provide search engines and visitors information they can use to understand the site content.
4. SEO is a standalone activity. Many facets of web design, hosting, and so on can impact your organic results to more or lesser degrees. People tend to think that SEO sits in a silo and other things can go on around it without influencing the work required to increase rankings.
5. First you get your site launched, then you add all the SEO goodness. SEO is not some bolt-on, like an outdoor deck you tack on to the back of your home. It’s more like the electrical wiring throughout your new home. Sure, you can build the house without the electrical and add it in later, but you’ll have to tear out the drywall to do it. Which might be fine if you like tripling costs and needlessly extending out the timeframe. SEO starts well before the site launches: it’s reflected in the functional specs, wireframes, mockups, content plan, and so on. And it continues for the life of the website.
6. I just hired a killer SEO agency; they’ll hit a home run for me. The agency will perform to the incentives you provide it. If they aren’t sharing in the upside but instead simply doing dollars-for-hours consulting, then it’s in their own best interest to expend as few hours as possible and thus maximize the profit per hour worked. So if it’s not in the contract, then don’t expect them to do it. One can’t blame them, though, as they are consultants, not free advice givers. Still, don’t assume because you read three quotes and selected one that that agency will work with your best interests in mind. Some will, many will claim to. Their job is not actually to perform SEO, that’s just what they try to do. Their job is to increase recurring billing to build their business. Just like your job is to get more traffic to build your business.
7. SEO is separate from SEM, social, etc. Actually, SEO is but one part of a larger overall marketing plan. It’s NOT the center, nor should it be. It remains a single tactic. To treat it separately and invest only in it is to run the race with blinders on.
8. SEO is free. I wrote about this one a couple years ago on Search Engine Land. No SEO works for free, whether on your payroll or hired as a consultant, there is a cost. Ditto designers working on CSS changes, IT folks setting up domains and IP addresses, etc. There is a cost to turning the dials and moving the levers of SEO and to think it’s free is folly. Yes, it can be cheaper than paid search, but paid search can also convert faster and more frequently than SEO on many phrases, so there you go. Want really stellar conversion rates? Get a good email program running in house.
9. I can hire someone with a year’s SEO experience and they can manage the work as part of their job. You get back what you put in, at a minimum. Put in less, get back less. The time it takes a neophyte to learn the details that make SEO work will be lost to your company. Add in mistakes and missed opportunities and you could be sinking the ship with your own cannons! Plus, if you don’t know SEO, how can you hire someone who does?
10. Can you give me the top 5 things to do to rank better and drive traffic? For maximum effect, be sure to ask the question before they have had a chance to examine your site. This question is as frustrating for SEOs as “How much does it cost to SEO the typical website?”. I’d equate it to the unanswerable question: “How long is a piece of string?” Also, if you’re going to ask for the magic elixir for better rankings and traffic (and don’t forget “long life”), you might as well base success on the better objective of driving quality traffic — which is only understood through web analytics integration and tying in with post-click behavior metrics.
11. Because someone is senior in the company, they must understand everything and are making decisions with a broad knowledge base inclusive of SEO. Case in point: the “CEO list” of keywords, a.k.a. the “trophy terms,” which may not be receiving any search volume other than from the CEO him/herself. Chances are there are better words to focus on that can drive a higher business return. Tread carefully here; you don’t want to upset the CEO.
12. Spending lots of money in paid search helps your organic rankings. Maybe this one is too old and hoary to include here, but people still ask it. I still hear that all the time. Sometimes I wish it was that easy….but no. The two are unconnected.
13. It’s either SEO or PPC. Nope, both have their place, and both have strengths and weaknesses.
14. We have been around for a long time/are really famous, so we don’t have to do SEO. Uhhhh….no. I could write a book on the reasons why, but just…no.
15. I learned a nifty new SEO trick/tactic from SMX/SEL/etc. and now I have the key to victory! Most of the advanced tools and tactics you learn at conferences and sites like this one only work after you have optimized the basic SEO building blocks of your site. Most advanced tactics build on the basics, not replace them. In fact, most advanced tactics won’t even work unless you have the basics in place already. The wider the pyramid base of your SEO, the higher your rankings can go.
16. I’ve got lots of links, so I don’t need to build more. This is related to #24 from my previous article. Most engines look at several factors related to links, including age. Old (established) links tend to indicate authority, whereas new ones tend to indicate freshness and relevance. You can get by with either, but it’s best to have both authority and relevance.
17. Kicking off an SEO program is a slow, many months long process. This is a self-serving myth that can buy the SEO firm or consultant a lot of time to keep you paying while they aren’t performing. “Be patient, just give it more time” can be a great stall tactic. This can be the case, but it doesn’t have to be. At Covario, we have been able to counter this tendency using automation and software solutions. For example, we consistently launch SEO programs on Organic Search Optimizer in 30 days or less.
18. SEO is a major, time-intensive, costly IT initiative. Again, this can be the case, but not necessarily. Typically, IT barriers slow the programs down, but they don’t have to. There are simple, cost-efficient technological workarounds: server modules, proxies, SaaS solutions, etc.
19. Google penalizes for duplicate content. I’ve long stated that it’s a filter, not a penalty. It may feel like a penalty because of the resultant rankings drop, but Google’s intention is not to penalize for inadvertent duplication due to tracking parameters, session IDs, and other canonicalization snafus.
20. Tweaking your meta description is the way to optimize the Google snippet’s conversion potential. As I described in my article “Anatomy of a Google Snippet,” the snippet content can be cobbled together from data from multiple sources, including the meta description, the HTML source of the page (even from pulldown select lists), or from the Open Directory listing.
21. Getting a link from a high PageRank domain will increase my PageRank and rankings. While this isn’t entirely untrue, as it will earn a level of “authority”…While the overall PageRank of a domain matters, the authority of the page you are getting a link from is more important, along with a whole range of other factors.
22. Number of top 30 rankings for your site is a good metric for success. I’ve seen so many places that use rankings as the end-all-be-all SEO metric. While that bothers me, sometimes I get that you don’t have much more to go off of. That said, I wouldn’t attribute value to rankings beyond the top 10. Once you start talking about rankings at the bottom of page 2 or worse, it’s largely irrelevant. How often have you seen traffic of any significance to a page based on it ranking #26? Does that mean it’s folly to track rankings beyond the top 10? Not at all. It’s useful for tracking progress on efforts expended on (what started out as) a poor campaign.
23. Google is looking at all the data they collect from toolbar, Chrome, etc. and using these signals for rankings. I’ve never seen a single instance where this has proved to be true…I’ve noticed many sites that are #1 in their category in regards to traffic and time spent online, yet they do not rank top 5 or even top 10 for some terms, even with good external links.
24. SEO is a chess game. The spammers make a move, the search engines respond, and around it goes. Spam tactics may come and go, but best practices stay pretty constant. That said, SEO is kind of like a chess game where you can move both your own and your opponent’s pieces (muahaha!).
25. Using a minimum of 40 tags per blogpost helps to increase your ranking in search engines. This was from a self-proclaimed marketing guru and SEO expert, if you can believe it.
26. Registering every room + phone extension in our office building as a separate location with Google Places helped us rank for generic_search_term_here Can you believe an in-house SEO presented this at a recent conference? (*cringe*)
27. The canonical tag is just as effective as 301 redirects for fixing canonicalization Not. really.
28. Toolbar PageRank is an accurate window into the internal/real PageRank. It’s only an approximation into internal/real PageRank that is a valuable metric to prioritize the crawling and indexing of pages. Pages with higher internal PageRank are crawled more frequently and indexed faster. This isn’t necessarily true for toolbar PageRank. According to Hamlet Batista, the real PageRank should be a number between 1 and 0. Many pages with no toolbar PageRank actually do have real PageRank. Google simply takes a while to update the values or might decide to not show the real value. On the other hand, pages with very low internal PageRank (few or no quality inbound links) usually don’t even get crawled.
29. Google uses the bounce rate as a ranking signal. The bounce rate metric primarily reflects how well-targeted a traffic source or keyword is or isn’t for the destination page. It doesn’t say much about the overall quality of the site, and is too noisy to be used as a ranking signal unless is part of the personalization feature.
30. Flawless HTML validation can help improve your rankings. Take any popular search term and run a validation check against the top 10 results. Most of them will fail validation. Search engines are much more interested in the quality of the content on the page and are smart enough to overcome most parsing errors in HTML documents.
31. Validating and cleaning up the HTML will drastically increase the speed of a site or page. The biggest bottleneck to overcome in site speed is not what you think! If you want to be blown away, read Google chief performance engineer Steve Souders’ books High Performance Web Sites (for primarily server-side stuff like caching reverse proxies and Gzip compression) and Even Faster Websites (for primarily client-side stuff like JavaScript optimization.)
32. Google cannot detect artificial link schemes such as three-way links, viralinks, link wheels, blog link networks, etc. Natural link structures follow specific statistical distributions and so do artificial ones. Google and other search engines employ a small army of advanced mathematics PhDs (can you say “graph theory”?), and they can – and do – identify artificial link schemes and usually penalize everyone involved.
33. That any agency can truly offer SEO without including some form of link building effort. There are many agencies (perhaps the majority) claiming to offer superior SEO, and do not engage in link building. With links thought to account for more than 50% of the algorithm, link building is crucial!
34. SEO is about rankings, not conversion. Conversion is a critical component to SEO. I’m a big proponent of optimizing the elements that will improve clickthrough from the SERPs — shortening the URL length, getting bolded words (KWiC) into your listing, refining the title and snippet copy to include compelling calls-to-action and value propositions — particularly at the beginning of the title & snippet which are the most viewed pieces of the listing. There’s real money to be had in that end of SEO.
35. Google gives extra weight to links from a few certain, more trustworthy top-level domains (TLDs) — specifically .edu, .gov, and .mil. Matt Cutts went on record on the topic of .edu links in an interview with me:
“There is nothing in the algorithm itself, though, that says: oh, .edu–give that link more weight. It is just .edu links tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to .edu’s or .gov’s.”
In my view, it’s because .edus tend to be in pristine link neighborhoods that these links are so valuable.
36. You can keep all your PageRank/link juice by not linking out. This may be conventional wisdom, but the math doesn’t work this way, as Hamlet Batista explains here. While keeping most/all links internally can help increase the overall PageRank of a site, the way the original PageRank formula works forces every site to give out link juice whether it does so explicitly or not.
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Reputation Management Sacramento
How Traffic Spiked For Site Offering Advice On How To Delete A Facebook Account
Need another data point from the search world illustrating the rise of concern over Facebook’s privacy changes. How about that chart above? It shows a huge spike to traffic at wikiHow, which has a handy guide on how to delete your Facebook account.
Earlier this week, I wrote about how there seemed to be an increase in the number of people searching for information on how to close their Facebook accounts. Growing On Google, People Asking
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