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Sep
3
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I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while—especially after following the contentious discussion in the comments of my last post. Rand Fishkin talks about why SEO firms should not guarantee rankings, and for the most part I agree with everything he says. But I am going to come down on the other side of the fence on this because it concerns a more profound issue that I feel most of us have been sweeping under the rug.
The problem is scammers who claim to be SEOs and who disrepute all of us with what they do. Wherever we draw the line between who is and who isn’t a “real SEO” is not important. There is no central authority or watchdog group that validates which SEO claims are true and which are false. But—and this is a big but—there is one way we can turn the tables. You guessed it: unlike scammers, we can guarantee our results.
Popularity: 3% [?]
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Jul
17
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This is a guest post by Paul Burani from Clicksharp Marketing, a very sharp search marketer I met in NY
In the search engine world, it’s easy to think in terms of black and white. Some traffic you pay for, some you don’t. There’s page one, and there’s everything else. And of course we use the terms “black hat” and “white hat” SEO to differentiate the practices which push (or exceed) the limits of what is deemed acceptable by each search engine’s terms of service.
This view often creates a temptation to pursue Search Engine Optimization at all costs, when in fact it may be an ill-advised strategy. What would lead a CEO, marketing manager, publisher or webmaster to make a dubious investment in SEO? In many cases, this is based on the simplistic notion that clicks from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising come at a significant price, whereas in organic search, they cost nothing.
The idea that SEO is free is patently false. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 32% [?]
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May
27
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It happens to the best of us. You work on an SEO campaign with a few carefully chosen keywords for months. But when you finally get to the top of the search engine results…nothing. The traffic you expected doesn’t come in or, even worse, neither does the money. You start to wonder, “What went wrong? Is it that people don’t like the search snippet? Are they finding what they want on the website?”
It’s perhaps the most frustrating thing that can happen to an SEO. But it’s also something you can often avoid completely with a little planning. In this post I’m going to talk about a technique I like for using pay-per-click first to test out my SEO game plan. This way the next time you make it to the top of the search rankings, the traffic and money will start pouring in! Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 61% [?]
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May
22
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It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post here as I am extremely busy with RankSense. In selling an SEO software suite I answer a lot of technical questions, but, oddly enough, I feel I have become much better at explaining what SEO actually is. As SEO has become more mainstream, and more people are curious about what exactly it means, I think it’s important to find ways to explain SEO in simple terms. That’s exactly what I want to do in this post: simple SEO in terms of goals, strategies, and tactics. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 59% [?]
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Mar
12
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Based on the emails and response I received for my contribution to the “Link Building Secrets” project, I know that I am not the only one that loves to use metrics to measure how close I am to my goals. Thanks to everyone for your emails and encouraging comments. In this post I want to reveal another useful metric I use for our internal and client projects.
When you check the backlinks of sites ranking for competitive keywords (terms with many search results) you see that those sites have a large number of links pointing to them. But if you count the links of the top ten (using Yahoo Site Explorer, as the rest of the backlink checkers are not very useful), you notice that the results at the top don’t necessarily have more links than the ones at the bottom. This is the case because each link carries a unique rank-boosting weight (real PageRank and other link-value factors in the case of Google) that contributes to the ranking of the page for that particular term. In order to simplify things, I like to refer to the combinations of positive and negative link value factors of a page as its Link Mass. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 100% [?]
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Mar
7
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In yesterday’s post I explained my creative process for uncovering new and interesting search marketing ideas. In this post I want to focus on the other critical element toward becoming an expert: endless experimentation. Of course testing must be done carefully to avoid arriving at the wrong conclusions, which will bring us to another of my favorite topics: human error.
As I like to do, let me explain my process with an actual example.
Last month there was an interesting post on SEOmoz about session IDs and HTTP cookies. In the post, Rand asserted that search engines don’t support cookies, and it’s therefore another alternative to controlling robot access to a site. Very clever; I don’t know how I didn’t think about that first! 
Well, in the comments, King questioned the validity of the original assumption that search engines don’t accept cookies. Here is what he had to say:
I’m not sure its [sic] really true that search engines (Google at least) don’t accept cookies. I recently (well 6 months ago) created a site that checks for cookies before allowing customers access to the shopping cart. If cookies are disabled it sends the user to a[n] info page on the topic Google indexed the actual shopping cart page perfectly well, they totally bypassed the “cookie info” page, and never indexed that at all. Cookie checking was done entirely via PHP code.
For a while I have assumed that Google does not support cookies, but the truth is that search engines are constantly being improved and have evolved over the years. For instance, years ago search engine crawlers did not follow links embedded in JavaScript, but recent experiments have proven that at least Google does follow the less intricate ones.
So, this was a perfect candidate for a simple experiment. Let’s confirm whether search engines accept cookies or not. As best I can, I like to follow the scientific method. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 83% [?]
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Mar
6
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If you want to become an expert you need to start thinking like one. People perceive you as an authority in your field not because you claim you are, but by listening to what you say or reading what you write. From my personal experience, the key seems to be the originality, usefulness and depth of what you have to share. Recently I was very honored to contribute to a link-building project. I wanted to share with you my idea, but more than that, in this blog I like to take extra time to explain the original thought process that helped me come up with the idea in the first place.
The Challenge
Toolbar PageRank was a very important factor in measuring the quality of a link for a long while. But Google has played so much with it that it can hardly be considered reliable these days. I like to see problems like these as challenges and opportunities, so I decided to look hard for alternatives. I know there are several other methods (like using the Yahoo backlink count, number of indexed pages, etc.) but I did not feel these directly reflected how the link was important to Google, or to any other specific search engine. Each search engine has its own evaluation criteria when it comes to links, so using metrics from one to measure another is not a reliable gauge in my opinion.
I knew the answer was out there, and I knew just where to look. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 74% [?]
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Mar
5
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I haven’t been blogging as often as usual lately and it’s about time I get back on track. I attended my first search marketing conference last week. I do not consider myself much of a conference-goer and I am not really much of an extrovert. Previously, I’d been to only two conferences—JavaOne in 2003, but that was before I fell in love with Python and had the team port all the server-side code to Python/Django—and LISA ’04 (Large Installation System Administration), a conference for Linux/Unix system administrators. I was tempted to go to one of the webmaster conferences, too, but I never saw much benefit in sharing tips and techniques with potential competitors. That was before I started blogging and began to understand the value of sharing, building authority and trust. Boy, after going to SMX West, I realize I have so much catching up to do in terms of networking!
This conference was particularly important for me because I wanted to use SMX West to help launch our flagship product, RankSense. We have worked on the software for more than three years (including several months of beta testing) and I think SMX was the just the right place for its debut. The first day I had to work with my team in final preparations for the booth, and the other two days I ended up staying on to answer questions and speak with guests, so I was not able to attend all the conference sessions. But I met a lot of wonderful people with whom I have exchanged emails, phone calls or instant messages, or whose quality work I simply enjoy online. Thanks to all of you, the conference was big success.
Although I was not able to attend the sessions, which from what I heard were extremely helpful, I did learn something very important. While I began by explaining the value of RankSense to people visiting the booth, on many occasions I had to back up and explain the value of SEO. Many folks I spoke with were unfamiliar with organic SEO because they primarily did pay-per-click (PPC) or were completely new to search marketing (some were coming from email marketing or other online marketing disciplines). I learned to perfect a pitch that worked very well, and I thought it would be a good idea to share it with you.
Here is how I explained the business value of SEO…
Popularity: 63% [?]
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Feb
6
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Internet security is a big problem, and it isn’t just for the IT staff anymore. It affects us as SEOs. Don’t believe me? Consider the incident reported at the end of last year by security research firm Sunbelt Software.
…criminals are now combining SEO tactics and booby-trapped Web pages, and doing it systematically. By posting tens of thousands of Web sites simultaneously, criminals can take over all the top spots on a search results page, casting a wide net that’s more likely to catch Web users. Eckelberry described these criminals as “SEO Gods,” saying they can “take any site and get it on the first page of Google results.”
Instead of wasting energy defacing sites and showing them off as trophies to their peers on IRC, hackers are now modifying the code of hacked sites to include (invisible) links to their web properties or link farms. The article talks about virus writers creating tens of thousands of websites and cross-linking them using all sorts of queries as anchor text. They then spam blog comments around the Web to improve the overall PageRank of the link farm.
Hackers already know how to break into sites. Now that they see the profit that can be made from top-ten search rankings, they have adapted their techniques to break to take advantage. Currently, search engines’ quality reviewers can detect most sites utilizing these black-hat techniques because they show up pretty obviously as SPAM. However, this is just the beginning, and I’m willing to predict that this is going to scale with cleverer hacks that are harder to detect. Most break-ins will be highly sophisticated and highly automated. They will “recruit” thousands of computers into their link-farm. If your site is one of those “recruited” without your knowledge, your site will most likely be penalized by the search engine along with the whole group.
How can somebody break into my server if they don’t know my password?
Popularity: 65% [?]
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Jan
15
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Another new year has come and many of us are still analyzing the balance of successes and failures of the previous one. It is definitely a useful chore. I am happy to count this blog as one of my successes. It was humbling to see it included in SearchEngineLand’s blogroll and nominated for Best SEO Research blog—I voted for Bill’s and I am glad he won the title :-)—among other accomplishments. Thanks to everyone for the recognition!
On the other hand, last year I had more goals that I didn’t quite reach than ones that I did, although I suppose that puts me in the big crowd. I like to start each year by revisiting the unachieved goals, the uncompleted projects, the planned-but-not-executed things I call my missed opportunities. One common one (and I am sure many of my peers experienced the same) is maximizing the number of clicks I get from organic listings. The problem, as many might be asking themselves, is how to measure the organic click-through rate in the first place! Read on to learn how….
Popularity: 73% [?]
