Filed under: Business Issues, SEM Research, Search Engine Optimization by Stuntdubl SEO at 11:15 am, 10/4/2006
Why are you always retrofitting and re-optimizing? Your CEO (or other decision maker) didn’t ask the right questions. You need to know how to build and promote a website from the ground up to be successful. Picture your perfect web presence. Visualize web 2.0 Zen. Now work backwards and apply these principles to your website among various time, budget, legacy technology, and personal ego obstacles of varying degrees in the way of your quest towards website enlightement. Welcome to the world of SEO.
There’s a big difference between an “ideal website” built in a vacuum with an unlimited budget and no competition versus retrofitting, optimizing, and improving and existing website. These are the questions your CEO forgot to ask. Make sure they get asked. If you understand the IDEAL website and the value of each component that would go into it - you can understand how to balance financial and time budgets for the highest ROI on a project, and overcome the normal hurdles that every company faces. These are the top questions your CEO forgot to ask.
1. Do we have a brandable domain?
I have always underestimated the power of a brandable domain. No longer. Once you reach critical mass - branding puts you over the top. Save a spot in your users mind, and traditional advertising might still work for you. As the saying goes, it’s much cheaper to keep a customer (or user) than to attract a new one. It’s easy to lose users with .net’s, dashed domains, and typos if it’s their first or second time to your site.
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2. Who should we host with that will be reliable?
There’s nearly nothing worst than doing a great job marketing - seeing the website get hammered with traffic, and feeling your stomach sink as you realize you blew it with crappy hosting. Don’t skimp out on hosting if your planning something big. At minimum - plan to scale and learn how to implement proper caching when necessary.
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3. Do we need pretty urls and will we use subdomains?
If you’re starting a site from scratch - pretty urls should be a priority - if you have an existing site, you need to weigh the benefit of the increased usability (and positive “SEO side effects”) against the time it takes to retrofit them with existing systems. Sometimes the cost jusitifes the change - sometimes not. Doing it right from the start is ALWAYS good practice, and it’s a lot easier than trying to fix this issue later (it turns real tricky real quick to retrofit this one).
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4. What is our website’s business model and how are we unique?
If you haven’t asked yourself this yet - you better hope you have a whole lot of visitors and sell before the web 2.0 bubble bursts. Just because myspace didn’t need one, doesn’t mean you’ll get away with just having a good idea, and a lot of eyeballs. Even if you have an AWESOME idea - you should develop ideas for an advertising or subscription revenue model or some fundamentals of it.
Don’t get sucked into being the web world’s equivalent of a hypebeast.
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5. Who is our target demographic and what will they search for?
Think BEYOND SEO - even if you don’t believe in it - Planning for the search in your user’s mind can save you from retrofitting for it later. Be one with your user. Unleash your inner customer Zen state of being. How would YOU search? How would your mother search? How would your grandmother search?
I currently have a client whose target market are mainly alpha computer geeks. I’m hoping we can make the website one that Nick Burns would love. Know whom you are writing too, their personality type, and how they read and learn.
"If your target audience isn’t listening, it’s not their fault, it’s yours." - Seth Godin
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6. What will the information architecture be like? What are the important top level keywords?
There needs to be balance between information architecture for usability and keyword information architecture for findability (SEO). IA is definitely one of the most underappreciated aspects of good search optimization as well as usability.
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7.Which platform should we use?
Your platform is going to be heavily dependant upon your staff and their strengths. You need to decide early on if you’re going to be a windows shop or an open source bunch of commies. I’m a LAMP fan myself, but I’ve always heard great things about MS SQL server for powering large DB’s. With Windows, you’ll probably get better support, with open source you’ll get less licensing fees. There are many other considerations including security, scalability, reliability, labor costs, add on licensing fees, availability of add ons, and much more.
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8. How do we create a professional design?
There’s no underestimating the power of a strong design. Design is one of the very strong indicators of trust and credibility in most users minds. It’s true that ugly sells - but sexy sells better. Don’t move backwards - create a CSS driven site that can be redesigned easily in a year, and separate the site form and function.
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9. How do we prove high credibility?
You need to maintain your credibility. With ANY business or organization you are only as good as your word. Prove your credibility and make it apparent - don’t make your users wonder about it.
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10. What ideas can we use for linkbait?
Why beg for links when you can convince people to give them to you naturally? Learn how to attract people’s attention and their link love.
Search Rankings = Content * Links * Time
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11. If we can’t create great bait, how do we buy, barter, and beg for links?
Sometimes you just have to know the value of a link and how to ask for it. Even if you’re the best in your business, you should still spend SOME time asking for links. Only arrogant wankers think they are are too good to ask for links. Be prepared to offer something of value in return. As Mike Grehan has said, "asking for a link is like asking to do business".
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12. Where else can we advertise?
Pay-per-click, banner ads, print, radio, flyers, direct mail, television, billboards and even bathroom stalls are all options. I like stuff I can track for improving later. Okay, I’ll admit I suck at traditional media - but when I need help in the area, I can certainly find the right places to look. I am certainly biased to online media because of the ROI I know it can demonstrate. There is still a multitude of opportunity with other traditional advertising - just be SURE to leverage your online presence (include and plug your url as well as special tracking urls like redirected domains) when doing your more traditional advertising.
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13.What will we use for tracking and analysis?
Which stats package is right for you? The one that tracks the needs of you and your customers and most cheaply and easily integrates to the rest of the web systems you’ve put in place. If you’re not doing tracking and analysis of your users with something more than free software - your company deserves to go out of business because of your hungry new upstart competitor.
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14. What will help increase conversions and/or actions and how can we provide users incentives to stay or return?
The beauty of online marketing is that you can track - and when you’re tracking, it’s all about the actions. You should strive to reduce your CPA (cost per action) through thorough testing and tracking to better understand your user’s behavior. Do you really think Google bought Urchin because of their intense desire to help webmasters by giving it away free?? It’s all about conversion.
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15. How will we keep administration simple for the entire staff to use? Your web presence will be much more powerful if you allow everyone in the company to share their expertise. Don’t force everyone to learn HTML - make it easy for them to contribute to the site without burdening others. You could create an overpriced custom CMS that will become nightmare legacy code when the programmer storms out in a fit of rage due to upper management’s ignorance - or you could find something friendly and open source that’s been around a while, and lots of people know about.
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16. How can we manage our reputation?
Do a search for your company name. Do a search for your key employee names. Do you really want someone else ranking there? If no, it’s time to start getting
proactive.
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17. How do we make the site “cluetrain friendly” and build a strong community environment?
In case you haven’t realized, “content is king” is cliche for a reason. Are YOU really gonna create ALL the content it takes? Is you’re company so full of itself that you only participate in monologues instead of dialogues?
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18. How do we scale and specialize for effective use of time?
The CEO should not be answering customer service e-mails. The strategist should not be doing link requests. The CTO should not be writing copy. It’s good to have cross discipline experience, but there is something to be said for sticking with specialized expertise. There are a lot of considerations that go into a website as you can see - If you specialize and organize your team you will get much better results. As the saying goes, "a cup of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Plan for your growth, and how time and resources will be allocated to scale properly.
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Summary - (Ask yourself, your CEO, or your SEO and get back to work)
- Do we have a brandable domain?
- Who should we host with that will be reliable?
- Do we need pretty urls and will you use subdomains?
- What is our website’s business model and how are we unique?
- Who is our target demographic and what will they search for?
- What will the information architecture be like? What are the important top level keywords?
- Which platform should we use?
- How do we create a professional design?
- How do we prove high credibility?
- What ideas can we use for linkbait?
- If we can’t create great bait, how do we buy, barter, and beg for links?
- Where else can we advertise?
- What will we use for tracking and analysis?
- What will help increase conversions and/or actions and how can we provide users incentives to stay or return?
- How will we keep administration simple for the entire staff to use?
- How can we manage our reputation?
- Is our model sustainable? (if you have a lead gen model like Quinstreet
- How do we make the site “cluetrain friendly” and build a strong community environment?
- How do we scale and specialize for effective use of time?
I got through the whole list with nearly no specific mention of SEO - that’s because SEO IS all these things - sure we could nitpick titles and internal anchor text, and there is certainly some value in that. There’s even more value in balancing the things mentioned above that impact search, and leaving the nitpicking to those who spend all their time in forums, and doing no actual work. I don’t care about the diminishing effectiveness of reciprocal links and h1’s - I care if our product is selling.
SEO is understanding the fundamentals of strong web presence principles, and being able to implement them within the constraints of a given project. SEO is not meta tags and keyword stuffing. You won’t get the right answers and results until you ask the right questions.
This is my list - What’s Yours?
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Filed under: Buzz Marketing, Search Engine Optimization by Stuntdubl SEO at 6:40 pm, 9/18/2006
I rarely do promotional posts unless I really believe in a product, and the person behind it. Andy has beat me to providing a linkbaiting service that I think will hold an enormous amount of value for subscribers. The service consists of writing an article that has a very high likelihood of going viral, and giving it the gentle nudge it needs for success in the social network arenas. Mr. Hagans has explained his service to me, and it is a great mix between public relations, viral marketing, and search optimization. All totaled - it looks like a pretty awesome service - and I’m sure if it wasn’t, Andy wouldn’t put his name on it. I don’t think he’s officially launched yet (though he gave me the okay to post this), so get in before the demand and price rises.
From Andy’s site:
* Quality organic links from blogs and other Web sites that will help organic SEO efforts (and yes, link baiting has been approved by search engine representatives as a “white hat” tactic)
* Brand exposure on social bookmarking and tagging sites, which can lead to mindshare overnight
* A large amount of traffic (thousands to tens of thousands of unique visitors)
* A feature piece of content on your Web site that will receive bookmarks, citations and links over time, and which will further entrench your Web site as unique and valuable to the community and Web as a whole.
This is probably a great place to mention Rand’s linkbaiting service as well - which is geared more towards application development that is likely to go viral. I really can’t picture Rand offering a poor service either.
Great stuff guys.
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization by Stuntdubl SEO at 2:45 pm, 8/31/2006
There are several quick easy ways to establish some trust for your domain. There are really no excuses to not have most of this stuff for any legitimate business website. It’s so easy and the opportunity cost is extremely low compared to the potential benefits. Read: Yes, this is speculative - but it’s also relatively easy, shouldn’t take you long, and MOST LIKELY will combine for better results. You can probably argue each one of these - but why bother when you could be out working on more sites to test it on?
1. Privacy Policy
2. Contact page with physical address and phone number
3. Submit to local listings (assists with above)
4. Extended period domain registration
5. Get a half dozen trusted links (if I told you they’d no longer be trusted)
6. Legit WHOIS data that matches other records
7. Dedicated IP* - recently mentioned by Jim.
8. Adding a FEW trusted outbound authority links - wikipedia, industry associations, etc.
9. Valid code (or close to anyhow) - you can argue this all day, but on a massive scale better code = higher quality
10. Fast server response time*
11. No 404’s
12. Extremely limited downtime*
*If you can afford more for a better host, you’re more likely to be in it for the long run, and likely to be of higher quality. Don’t believe me? Would you be more trusting buying a car from someone with three cars on the side of the road, or a dealership that had been in business 20 years and had a nice location? Why do you think big banks are located in high rent downtown districts and have marble floors?
Pay attention to what is credible to both users AND someone with a search relevance quality mindset. Everyone says optimize for users - try optimizing your site for to convince a savvy threadwatch readin’, affiliate site buildin’ fickle user that you are credible, and it will probably help your SEO efforts these days.
These are the easy ways - you have to work them together and THINK about what would indicate quality on a mass level. Seriously folks, quality indicators = trust. It’s not about keyword stuffing and link bombing anymore…SEO is about proving you’re trustworthy - it makes it even easier when you actually ARE - but even if you ARE - you have to know how to SHOW that you are. Let the damn dog sniff your hand!
Inspired by Michael’s recent post on Google using WHOIS data.
From GrayWolf:
So how would one go about providing that strong indication of quality in the absence of actual quality?
Yes. Sometimes you gotta fake the funk when you’re an affiliate. That’s why affiliates know how to display and identify ACTUAL trust when it’s present. That’s also why affiliate types are fickle shoppers and know how to look for credibility on a website (kinda like evaluating reviews and ratings on ebay). SE’s don’t hate affiliates - they hate low quality, non-trustworthy sites. They’re just gonna “play the odds” with indicators of quality.
Trust is a big piece of the equation right now. There’s too many GOOD sites for engines to worry too much about collateral damage. If you don’t know how to PROVE you’re trustworthy, then you definitely won’t be.
More reading
A good SEO is both a geek and a suit, and is able to speak the language of both worlds. Providing SEO services without understanding both business and techie principles is the equivalent of trying to teach english to spanish children without knowing both languages and cultural mores of both fluently.
A few ways to judge if you may even be a tech guy that speaks marketing:
1 - You’re a card carrying member of the DMA, AMA, or MMA and know what USB, C-class IP, DNS, WHOIS, PPC, and G stands for.
2 - Every morning you recite the 4 P’s of the marketing mix as well as all mnemonics for the OSI Model including how it is like a 7 layer burrito.
3 - You know what city Madison Avenue is in as well as who invented the altair, TI, and Atari.
4 - You dream about purple cows and have listened to pink floyd synched with the wizard of oz after consuming various forms of caffeine.
5 - You read Adweek, Adage, Brand Republic, Fast Magazine, Inc.com, Linux Journal, Linux Mag, and Apache Week.
6 - You use linkedin and 2600 in the same day.
7 - You’ve heard of Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Saatchi and Saatchi, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, BBDO, and can speculate how many boxes they run, their bandwidth speeds and marvel at how well Grand Theft Auto would run on their intranet infrastructures.
8 - You buy text links and optimize webhost performance.
9 - You are a certified Ambassador, Adwords professional, A+, network +, and cisco certified MCSE (marketing computer speak explainer).
10 - You can name the top 5 most run banner ads of all time, and still surf with javascript off from a proxy, and cloaking your user agent
Your marketing guys and gals need to communicate the how’s and why’s of both marketing and SEO to their caffeine and sugar sipping cohorts coding databases down the hall.
SEO/SEM is getting your marketing guys to talk to your techies (and maybe even hang out and ENJOY their differences of world and work views). SEO is bridging the business/ technology communication digital divide. I really enjoy both worlds, and training on the areas that oftentimes get missed when the dialogue is incomplete or strained due to how different they have traditionally been. Think of the stereotype of both groups (while stereotypes are not great, they are often based somewhat in reality), and you couldn’t have two more different type of people. These differences cause the cognitive dissonance that IS SEO.
This is the essence of SEO - project management that improves the communication between folks who specialize in marketing and those that specialize in technology for a better understanding of improving the relevance of a website for optimial search performance. This is a new idea, and even the personality type is a completely new one (thus the demand right now). If you work for a marketing company, ad agency, PR firm or SEO company that needs some strategic advice - I have a deal for you, Drop me a line, and I’ll fill you in, or point you in the direction of some good folks and information that may be able to help you.
Filed under: Google, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo/ MSN by Stuntdubl SEO at 1:10 am, 7/5/2006
Firstly, it’s a Trustbox, not a Sandbox. “Trust filters” seem to be a large portion of what has most SEO’s in a frenzy over search engine’s currently. There are pros and cons to the trustbox for folks on both sides of the fence, and the best thing you can do no matter which side of the game you are on is understand what the filters mean and the reprocussions that they will create in the future.
So what is search engine trust?
For the purpose of keeping things simple, I would identify a site’s trust by 3 different simple criteria:
- Website Age - (most importantly the first time it was indexed)
- Total # of backlinks and the overall age of those links
- Total “trustscore” of other backlinks (How many .edu’s, .gov’s, high ACTUAL PR links, etc.)
Aaron just released an amazing SEO extension for firefox that gives some great insights to these areas.
Most trust criteria revolve around some dependence on age, which is actually a pretty good signal of quality. From things folks at Google have said in the past, the trustbox (or sandbox if you must) was the unintentional effect of some other filters that were implemented. Realizing that age was a great signal all the way around to defend against the overdependency on links, they’ve went buckwild with age variables ever since.
I’m sure there are plenty of other things that effect trust, but these are most likely tops on the list. Think age related to just about any of the search ranking factors and it could (or probably is) being used.
Just how important is being trusted right now?
I figured it was about time for a rant on the trust of domains (mainly in Google), and when I spent some time on a recent roadtrip listening to some excellent Strikepoint podcasts, I really knew it was time. DaveN has some fantastic commentary on just how important trust is in ranking in google these days. I’m not sure exactly which episode it was (I listened to three or four and they were all very insightful), but Dave, Mikkel, or JasonD talk about 85% of search rankings these days being attributed to trust, and about 15% being onpage, and it is painfully true. With a few links to a highly trusted domain, and some body copy a site can rank for just about anything whether it is topically related or not.
There are examples everywhere on the web of just how critical trust is right now to top rankings. Don’t get me wrong…trust is a very good thing, and a great signal of quality, but depending almost solely on it is not the solution, as depending nearly solely on links was not the best solution.
Two or three years ago:
SEO = Content + high PR links
Created: a micro-economy of link buying solely for google rankings
Now
SEO = Crusty trusted domain + content
Will create: use your imagination.
Why the Overdependence on Trust Will Again Change the Web
The search engines are probably the most important aspect of the web. There are BILLIONS of pages of information available, but if you can’t find any of them, it makes instant access a WHOLE lot more difficult. The internet without search would be the equivalent of a library that was just a big pile of books that sometimes had a few similar books near each other.
“…the meaning of a link has been transformed from a reference to a vote.” - Bill Slawski, from his interview with Aaron.
“A link is a vote” has transformed the face of the web both for good and bad. It’s easy for SE’s to place all the blame on “spammers”, but to assume that there will be no manipulation with monetary stakes so high is somewhat naive as well. As long as the rewards are high, and the barrier to entry is low, there will be search engine spam. In addition to spam, there will always be folks who have a higher risk thresh hold for the potential of higher rewards. As everyone realized the value of a link more and more, it changed how every webmaster thought about the world wide web. The more motivated people were by money, the more extensive lengths they were willing to go for obtaining links that have their own inherent monetary value.
The over dependency on trust is the very same thing. It is going to cause trust to be abused in the very same way links were. We are already seeing the proliferation of subdomain spam, and after that is remedied there will still be the issue of hosting advertising space on a website.
One of the extremely big problems with trust filters is that they don’t seem to be retroactive…meaning that sites that were around and trusted BEFORE a particular filter was established can basically get away with murder (and they do).
The Trust Knob is Way too High…Please Turn it Back
One of the really great things about the web is that it has evened up the playing field for the little guys. The barrier to entry is constantly being raised, but for this unique window of opportunity, everyone has been given the opportunity to potentially start a successful online business if they are ambitious enough and spend time doing the right things.
Hey Google, remember when YOU were the little guy starting up in a garage ten years or so ago. Why not make the window of opportunity for little guys last just a little bit longer, and dial the trust thing back a bit eh? The trust knob has restored the balance of power right back into the hands of the big guys who can now do whatever they want with their “trusted domains” and be back in the index in days or never get removed at all. Why not give Joe’s ultra amazing toothpaste (the company with very little marketing budget because they spend their money making an amazing product) a chance to rank high for “toothpaste” for just a little bit longer instead of HELPING companies who’ve been spending millions of dollars on their “brand” instead of their product for the last decade or more?
Setting the barrier to entry so high just begs for abuse of the system. If SEO’s know that they can’t rank a new site for two years…why the hell would they bother to register a new domain…or take on a client with a brand new site? They are going to look for workarounds…and we all know what the workarounds are. The variations of these workarounds mutate and evolve to cause a whole new host of problems.
Please Google…turn the knob back before you make the problems even worse. The solution may be good in the short term, but you were great once because you helped the little guys that were hungry and cared about their customers. Focus on HELPING those people again and you will create great SERPS for your users and have to worry less about fighting spammers. Trust is a great signal of quality, but by moving so heavily to this model you are going to created the same problems that you did with the over dependency on link popularity.
Obligatory required reading on the Trustbox
Filed under: General, Industry Stuff, Search Engine Optimization by Stuntdubl SEO at 12:08 am, 4/10/2006
We’ve already discussed SEO generations, how some folks entered the industry at different times and learned from others. Outside of the SEO sphere, however, SEO seems to elicit a much different response from folks based on their different (often negative) experiences with those claiming to be an SEO.
To me, SEO has been a very positive experience to which I ascribe a lot of appreciation and respect. When I call someone a “good SEO”, “veteran SEO” or even admit to them being “a SEO” I consider I am giving them a compliment, even if their knowledge and expertise reaches far past simple search engine optimization. It is a much different idea to me for someone to “be an SEO” than it is to many other folks. It seems in other circles that same respect doesn’t apply to someone “being a SEO”. It’s sometimes frustrating to have the industry shut off to its’ own little world, but as many have mentioned, it’s probably a good thing that most folks don’t “get it”. I tell most folks I am an “internet marketing consultant”, but in my heart I am an “SEO”.
I have a somewhat bad habit of encompassing all knowledge of the internet into “being an SEO”. I think being an SEO is being a “meta-webmaster”, project manager, or internet marketing engineer. It may even be more than that. It is a way of thinking. SEO’s are resourceful soldiers of fortune. It is fundamental understanding of all opportunities available and applying the best solution for a given situation, and prioritizing goals into an actionable plan that considers business principles of scaling cash flow and other important concepts. Perhaps my view is wrong and I give “SEO’s” too much credit. Perhaps someone with these qualities needs a new flashy moniker to seperate them from those who have just started to do meta tags and search engine submissions.
Part of the problem may be the fact that there is a definitive life cycle to SEO’s. Most folks will be drawn in at some point as part of a job our their own business. They will proceed to grow their understanding to use it to help others, grow their own business, or do consulting. Most of the stellar SEO folks will end up doing affiliate marketing or starting their own non-SEO business models. They grow increasingly frustrated with the information gap between themselves and the prospects seeking services. I truly enjoy the education process myself most the time, and have learned ways to filter folks that I can’t help in a reasonable amount of time, and try to provide them with some resources to educate themselves. Those starting to the game a bit later have the added benefit of an abundance of QUALITY information once they manage to find it.
This life cycle of SEO’s has caused a shortage and high demand for in-house SEO’s that are willing to be trained, as well as consultants who can help do so, or provide more value than in house resources. The increased demand only serves to drive many new folks to claim to provide SEO services (I was guilty of this myself about 4+ years ago). The new faces with little experience combined with hucksters trying to make a few quick bucks in a fledgling field has helped to sully the reputation associated with SEO in the eyes of many who still just view SEO as a one-dimensional discipline.
If the web as a whole can enter a second bubble with Web 2.0’s excessive gradients, nice round corners, mirror effects, and other nice graphics and social networking ideas, can’t SEO’s come up with a new way to market their services? I’ve already tried to disavow SEO once, but I was drawn back with it’s sauve siren-song seductiveness. Isn’t there some other way that we can differentiate ourselves and retain the positive history behind the title?
A Modest Proposal - SEO 2.0
I think it’s time to rebrand SEO a little bit as SEO 2.0. SEO 2.0 will never over-hype expectations, make false promises, or sell services without discussing risks or educating clients. SEO 2.0 will have a fundamental understanding of design, conversion, technology, webservers, business, psychology, PPC, shopping feeds, affiliate marketing, economics, and other broad principles to apply to more than just higher search rankings, but to making businesses better. SEO 2.0 will continue to learn beyond the normal realm of meta tags and on-page tweaks to understand social networking, marketing, business, and anything else that may impact the success of a website. SEO 2.0 will be pretty, shiny, maintain a stellar reputation and will be well funded. Step up your game and jump on for SEO 2.0. Your services and knowledgebase will evolve or you’ll be obsolete and your luck will run out when the bubble bursts.
Filed under: General, Industry Stuff, Search Engine Optimization by Stuntdubl SEO at 6:04 pm, 3/26/2006
10. You can say you know Aaron Wall and Rand.
9. Because most people will never “get it” and that’s a good thing.
8. Everybody’s an expert because even the most experienced have only done it about 10 years.
7. You get to read Matt’s “seo blog”
6. You’ve experienced a “google dance”
5. Top 10 listings
4. You travel on a national or world tour “for work”.
3. This is not a bubble.
2. Everyone loves web 2.0 and it’s impossible to not make money with even a little SEO knowledge
1. It’s fun to be the hero!
