Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

As I sit in my recliner with the Olympics glowing in the periphery, I can’t help but think how few people have the motivation to devote four years at a time for their shot at glory.  I’m fairly certain a lot of these athletes forgo making a decent living to pursue their passion.  As I mull over all of that dedication to hard work, I realize just how much I like being lazy.  So in this edition of SEO on a Nickel, I’ll offer up a quick and easy way to continuously build links - blog commenting.

Now, let me say this first.  I do not condone spamming blogs for links. If you read this blog and use its contents as ammunition to spam other blogs, there is a good chance you will be eaten by polar bears…but I digress.  Let’s get down to business.  Here’s the tools we’ll be using today:

1. Google Reader
2. Google Alerts

Short list, eh?  I said this was going to be a testament laziness, didn’t I?  Okay, so here’s the idea.  If you don’t have much time, a great way to find links is to set up a handful of relevant searches in Google Alerts and spend a few minutes each week looking for relevant blogs to post on in Google Reader.

The first thing you need to do is recognize what linkable assets you have on your site.  Is your home page a valuable asset?  Is it a site that has particular value for a product category or a niche interest?  Perhaps you have an article section with valuable information, or some tools on your site that make it easier to find the right product or calculate an important equation.  Regardless, most sites have some specific linkable assets, and if not, start by making some unique content that relevant sites in your industry would want to link to.

Secondly, do a couple of searches in Google blog search to identify some searches that provide a healthy amount of returns.  If you sell blue widgets, you may just want to do a search for “blue widgets” or if you want something more specific to blue widgets, you might want to search  intitle:”blue widgets” which will return only blog posts with the phrase blue widgets in the title.  Handy, eh?  If you want to take it a step further, you can add some additional elements to your search to find blogs that are more likely to be dofollow - or as some of the industry insiders call them, “footprints”.  An example of this would be blue widget “allowed html tags:” which is a footprint in the comment section used on many blogs that tend to allow dofollowed links within the comments.  The link query tool from Ontolo can be used to show you a whole bunch of ideas for this (use your keyword and then select conversation from the linkable opportunity type drop down).

With some queries in place, get into Google Alerts and set up your search:

Keep up on your blue widgets.

Once you create your alert, you can choose to edit your alerts where you can select the option to view in Google Reader.  Otherwise, I suppose you can have them sent to your inbox (but that’s sooooooooooo 2008).  Now, you can set up a time each week to find appropriate blog posts where your comment can add value through providing a link to your site.

Once again, I recommend that you don’t bombard every blog you come across.  Chances are you’ll find some blogs that are good communities to participate in aside from building links, so if you’re a good citizen, you can make some worthwhile connections that may lead to a bevy of other opportunities.  So keep that in mind before you start angering people…or the polar bears.

The SEO polar bear hates blog spammers! Image courtesy of www.freeimagedepot.com

And I would be remiss not to point out that I fleshed this post out from Navin Poeran’s suggestion on Search Engine Land a while back.  That post will open your eyes to the immense number of ways you can use search queries to identify linking opportunities.  Until next time, I wish you lazy but successful link building.

Life isn’t a beauty contest.  Plenty of ugly people can be successful (even *I* earn a living), and I’ve seen some horrific websites make money for companies.  One thing that I’ve learned in the SEO business over the last few years is that sometimes it pays to say no to a hideous website when someone asks you to market it.

The nice thing about being your own boss is that you don’t have to say yes all the time, but at the same time, you don’t want to turn down business when you’re still relatively young.  Thus the conundrum of being an SEO that needs to eat.  But if you’re in this situation, and you can financially say no, sometimes it’s the right thing to do when someone offers you a website that’s just downright wretched.

Paddles without holes = good.

Sadly, when people think of the negative impact of a poorly constructed/butt ugly website they usually just think of higher bounce rates and lower conversion.  But if you’re an SEO/link builder, you’ve essentially been handed an oar with a hole in it.  You can still paddle, but you do twice the work for half the results.  What do I mean?

Link building is a sales job.  At the end of the day as a link builder you’re out networking and selling others on the value of your content and why they should link to it.  If you’ve ever worked in sales at all, you’ll know that selling an inferior product is a nightmare, and you genuinely don’t feel confident in pushing it.  That not only leads to poor outcomes, but it leads to a defeatist attitude.  Now, even if the site functions well, but is just ugly, you’re still left pitching a brown Zune.

This guy chose to rock the brown Zune. Did anyone else?

Don’t know the Zune?  It’s Microsoft’s foray into the mp3 player realm…they launched a brown version of it when they first rolled them out.  Seriously.  I own a Zune, it’s a pretty nice player, but there’s no way I would buy a brown one (and this is coming from a guy who owns a pink iPod mini).  I wouldn’t want to be seen with something that ugly…which is the same scenario you’ll run into when requesting links.

“Well…uh…yeah, your site has some good info, but I don’t think I want my super expensive, uber-sexy website being associated with your…umm…ugly one.”

That’s a conversation you don’t want to be on the receiving end of.

Image credits:

Many months back we began working with a client who had just launched a new website and wanted to get some quick SEO results.  Their portal site was an excellent tool, well set up for link building, but the site was almost entirely a graphic interface - no content.

Don't mess with the Google!

In our initial meetings I quickly identified this as a problem, and said we needed to aadd some content if we were going to have a chance to begin ranking well for the variety of terms they wanted to go after.  The initial design had the interface all existing above the fold, and they wanted to keep it that way.  So they created a “slider” div that allowed the visitor to move images and see descriptive content about the pages.  I thought this was a good solution, until the client decided that they didn’t want to make an obvious link to enable this functionality.  Rather than adding a “read more” button or something of the like, they developed a nondescript button and shoved it into a corner of the page where no user would ever find it.

The first words out of my mouth were, “You guys are running a serious risk of getting penalized for hidden content.”  The designer wouldn’t budge, and they designed the site their way and rolled it out.  The site quickly attracted links and quickly achieved top rankings for all of their desired target keywords.  A few weeks ago, I got an email reading, “Our rankings have tanked!  Help!”

The odd thing was, some of the secondary keywords continued to rank well.  Only 4 or 5 of the site’s most important keyword had dropped from first page rankings to anywhere from the third page, the tenth page or to completely out of the rankings.  This didn’t make sense as mere jitter, or a huge surge in competitors.  The basic metrics (both on site and off) had not changed significantly in the past week, and entire pages weren’t being penalized, only certain terms.  This was far too unusual to have happened naturally, so it became fairly obvious this was a penalty aimed at this site’s most important keywords.  With the holiday rush on, they had no time to lose to get this organic traffic (which coincidentally was their most profitable traffic) back up to speed.

I worked with them to craft the letter, and followed Google’s reconsideration guidelines.  It went a little something like this:

Our business is based on creating value-added content by categorizing service providers with direct access to their service pages.  A user comes to our site to determine what service provider will offer the bhe best service, and for immediate access to the pages for those providers.  We are providing a service in this market that is similar to the service that Kayak.com provides to the airplane ticket market.  As a result, our rank in Google’s search results is very important to us.

Prior to recent events, we were ranked quite highly for terms related to our service such as X, Y, and Z.  We’ve worked closely with an SEO firm, Netvantage Marketing based locally in Michigan, to obtain these search results.  Following their guidance, we’ve gone from a relative unknown to a first page result for many queries.  However, recently we have fallen off the results altogether for a portion of search terms, while maintaining our ranking for others.  An example search term is “X”.  Our Google webmaster tools report from last week tell sus that our search rank for this term was #2, but now search results don’t show us anywhere within the first 200 results.  Whereas, “A” is a term we have been #1 for and still are #1 today.  We don’t even show up when searching our own brand name despite the fact that all of the results are sites that are directly related to our business.  This recent drop in rankings appears to have occured on or around December 5th, 2009 and does not correspond with any substantial changes in the content of our site.

The drop in results seems to indicate that we are being penalized for some reason.  Netvantage Marketing has recommended that we make some minor modifications to our site and that we request reconsideration from Google.  After a thorough review of our site, our only content that could viewed as worthy of a penalty is our “more info” content on each page that is not immediately visible until the slider is advanced to that page.  We use the slider to present a cool and unique way of viewing our content without overwhelming the user with too much content at once.  We had used a button that lacked a description to point to the slider page containing the additional information, but we have since replace the button with the clickable words “more info.”  We believe that we are being true to the guidelines set forth by Google regarding the quality of content, and all of our SEO content has been planned and reviewed by our SEO firm.  Please consider that our business is a value-added concept, and as a result we expect to be found on searches for the terms mentioned above so that a user is presented with many options for purchasing a related service.  We have no intent to deceive the user and we have never heard of any complaints regarding users coming to our site and feeling mislead.  As such, we would like to request reconsideration.

Sincerely,

Joe Public

I know that a lot of people can accidentally run into this problem, so I thought it would be valuable to show what a successful identification and reconsideration request looks like.  For more resources of value, check out the following:

• from Search Engine Journal
• from Google themselves

This might not seem like the most original post in the world, as a lot of people have covered the topic of keyword selection before, and done so quite well.  One thing I’ve noticed that’s usually missing from these posts, however, is a practical and quick methodology with some examples.  So today, I’m going to walk you through an example of how you can make some smarter decisions on keyword selection.

First, the tools you’ll need to pull this off:

• Google Keyword Tool
• SEO Quake Add-on for Firefox or IE
• Google

Second, the overall concept of what we’re trying to do:

When I talk with clients I ask the three basic questions in keyword selection.

1. What keywords will bring the most traffic to your site?
2. What keywords are likely to bring traffic that will convert into leads or sales?
3. How feasible is it to rank highly for that keyword?

Ideally, you want keywords that meet all three criteria.  My typical rule of thumb for a site is to try to rank in the first three results, because at the fourth listing you’ll only get around 6% of clicks  (so says the numbers from AOL).

So here’s the process, in order of activity for a quick way to select your keywords.

1. Identify the target pages you will be optimizing for
2. Create a list of keywords that pertain to the product/service offered on each page (you can have 5, you can have 50)
3. Toss those keywords into the Google Keyword Tool and export them to a CSV (make sure you use the drop down in the upper right corner to select “exact match” - this will give you more accurate estimates for SEO purposes…and no, these are never exact) .  If you’re looking for additional ideas, let the keyword tool run a scan of the page itself, or a few competitors’ pages.  Export and combine these numbers, using whichever volume, global or local, pertains to your page/site.
   1. If there’s strong seasonality in your business, you may want to look into grabbing Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence Tool, which will help demonstrate possible opportunities and threats for keywords in terms of seasonality.
4. With this initial list, start weeding out the keywords that don’t match or are too general.  Once you have that in place, sort by volume - high to low.  Now go down the list with your second piece of criteria in mind - likelihood to convert.  Here, you can toss things out like “athletic shoes” in favor of “discount running shoes” if your page has a heavy emphasis on low cost running shoes.
5. At this point your list should be cut down pretty substantially, so now it’s time to look at feasibility.  With the SEO Quake Toolbar installed, just turn it on before you do a search on each of your keywords and you’ll have some intelligence available to you in your search results - such as the page’s PageRank, Yahoo SiteExplorer’s stats for links to the page (L) and links to the domain (LD).  The lower these numbers are, the more likely you can quickly achieve this ranking.  Other items to look for include whether or not it’s the site’s home page (typically stronger pages, more likely to capture links) and whether the page title contains the keyword (the page title is always the clickable link in search results.  In the example below, the keyword search was for “keyword 1″ and it is in the title, so that would be something to take note of.

Coming back to my previous comment, I usually aim for the top three positions.  So if you’re in a hurry, I’d grab the metrics I’ve mentioned and build a table for all of your keywords based on these metrics and one more - PageRank of the site’s home page.  Here’s my logic behind each metric.

1. PageRank of ranking page - If Google has determined the page has authority and trust, you’ll need to acquire some, too
2. PageRank of site’s home page - This is usually a quick indicator of whether the entire domain has a high trust score, which can also be a problem if you’re trying to outrank a seemingly menial page on a behemoth of an authority site (this is why Wikipedia is so hard to outrank)
3. Whether or not the page is the home page - as I said before, this is usually a site’s strongest page, so it can be some extra work to outrank it with a subpage, or it may always be a threat if there are a lot of home pages around you who suddenly decide to start getting aggressive with SEO
4. Page links - If a page has a lot of links and a high PageRank, that usually means the page has some good links and/or is attached to a strong domain.  This is a red flag if this number is high, and an even bigger red flag if it’s a sub page with a large number
5. Domain links - another domain strength metric, the home page may not be responsible for all the links, so if the site’s pulling in links from all angles, this is another major hurdle to climb
6. Keyword in title - this is the most important on page element, so if the other sites are fairly serious about your keyword, you should see this bolded all over the titles on the first page of search results, if not, there may be opportunity.

If you take this approach, you’ll build a spreadsheet like the one I have assembled below, where you can go through and quickly select your best opportunities based on the above criteria.

I hope this walk through is helpful for those of you who may not have all the time in the world or the tools available to build a helpful process for keyword selection.  If you want to read more on this wildly fascinating topic from people much smarter than I, I would suggest the following:

• SEOMoz’s 10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research
• Search Engine People’s Proven System
• Hobo’s Keyword Research For Beginners with Aaron Wall
• 5 Steps to Effective Keyword Research on the Search Engine Guide Blog

Lots of people can debate what the best restaurant in Lansing is, and I don’t want to step into that argument.  However, while searching for some ideas for a place to eat the other day I decided to Google “Lansing restaurant” and as a professional SEO I couldn’t help but take notice of the order of the local listings.  Not that Google gives away their secret recipe, but I figured it’s worth a look at some of the elements that likely determine the rankings so you local business owners out there can take steps to climb the rankings for whatever it is that you do.

So let’s take a look at the search results:

And the winner is...Clara's!

As of 1am on Tuesday, November 17th, Clara’s comes out on top.  But what puts them in front of the Knight Cap?  First, let’s look at some purely local business center elements.

• Most experts agree and evidence seems to show a correlation between business location and distance from the center of the search geography.  In this case, the Knight Cap is actually slightly closer, so in terms of sheer geographic location, the Knight Cap has the edge (albeit a slight one)
• Reviews can also be an important element - showing user interest and usage of the local business.  Here we see Clara’s is the clear winner among pure restaurants.  The Sheraton may have the most reviews, but suffers in terms of relevance (most of the listing details refer to the hotel, not the restaurant).
• In terms of the actual listing information, it appears that neither Clara’s or the Knight Cap have taken ownership and verified their listings, so the details have been provided by the public, who seem to have done a slightly better job with Clara’s.  Though, to be honest, they both could use some work in terms of completeness.

Clara's has more "restaurant" related information in its listing.

The Knight Cap has very few details when it should be as descriptive as possible.

• The new and improved local business center also has details on the number of related websites for the local business, another strong indicator of its importance.  On this metric Clara’s wins by a count of 70 to 43.

So from a purely local business center standpoint, Clara’s seems to have a pretty significant advantage in ranking out for the term “Lansing restaurant”.  But beyond just the local elements, more traditional SEO elements come in to play as well.  So let’s take a look at those factors.

• In terms of on page optimization, both sites leave a lot to be desired, but Clara’s does utilize unique page titles and makes sure to fit in the words “Lansing” and “restaurant” within the page title.  There’s not much in terms of other on page elements like consistent keyword usage, header tags, alt tags, and meta descriptions.  The Knight Cap is in much worse shape, as the title doesn’t even mention the word “restaurant” though it does contain the Lansing address.  However, the site’s content is done in Flash, so it’s basically unreadable to a search engine, meaning it has no idea what the page is really about aside from the non-Flash content.
• As far as off page issues, Clara’s has a massive advantage.  I’m not going to dig into anchor text or the quality of each individual link, but according to Yahoo Site Explorer, Clara’s domain has 1,011 links compared to the Knight Cap’s 60.  Google’s PageRank is usually a pretty good indicator in terms of its determination of a site’s importance, and Clara’s home page currently has a 4 compared to the Knight Cap’s 2.

So without a doubt, Clara’s takes it home as Lansing’s best SEO’d restaurant, regardless of your tastes.  Without some major work by the other local establishments, this won’t be changing any time in the near future.  My official scorecard is as follows:

The final Lansing restaurant SEO tally