Alright I'm giving in. I can't help but write a piece about the recent announcement from Matt Cutts regarding how nofollow links are treated by Google. There's been a lot of coverage on this so I'll skip rehashing it and instead provide some perspective from the side of the agency SEO in the trenches working with client sites. For simplicity, I'm going to interview myself.

A lot of SEO clients aren't getting the most out of their SEO engagements. Not because the SEO agency is doing anything to be deceptive or being uncooperative in any way, but simply because the SEO client hasn't put much thought or effort into what they should be doing. In an earlier post I described several different SEO client types along with highlighting the good vs. the bad. In this post I'm going to expand on the idea of what makes an SEO client a good client which in turn results in the client getting the biggest bang for their buck.

In an ideal world, clients would hire an SEO agency and actually follow the direction from that agency. Sadly, this is often not the case. In fact, with large companies, like the ones I've been working with for years, I sometimes wonder if there'd be any difference if they just cut a check and went a away for twelve months. OK, so I'm exaggerating, but it does seem like there's a disproportionate amount of wheel spinning in place of actual progress with some projects. What's more, it seems like the client, during the pitch process, gave plenty of clues about what type of client they were going to be. So I've put together a guide to bucketing prospects that should help in deciding whether to take a particular project on.

You wouldn't think it would be possible to accidentally issue a 404 error code for every page request to a site. But I'm a particularly talented individual and that's just what I did. You see, apparently I had seen it all so it seemed like a good idea to create a brand new problem to keep myself busy.

Sometimes SEO is a tough sell. You wouldn't think so because the benefits are quite significant and easy to measure. In such cases, approaching SEO in a more stealthy err… subtle manner can bring about the desired effects. For example, if the person or team you're talking to has demonstrated trust in the field of usability, you can piggy-back off of that trust to get your optimization recommendations implemented.

The first success metric that Target Marketing magazine highlights in their February 2009 spotlight on SEO is,

"…the web site…PortugalSpainBoth.com traveled from zero page one rankings on major search engines to 506 pages ones in nine months — all through organic search."

Hmmm…

There's a lot of hubhub about a new paid link program from the MediaWhiz folks. I'm on the side of everyone that thinks these links will eventually be detected by Google. My reasons are simple: if the system works it will attract enough use that such use will leave footprints. It's sort of like an investment system that works until so many people know about it that the market adjusts to account for the new trading patterns.

There was much excitement in the SEO world recently when some people noticed that Google was including search volume in its AdWords Keyword tool. At first this was thought to be a leak, but Google has now confirmed the change so it's official. The implications of this additional data are far reaching, but I think people are too busy looking up keyword data to have realized. Fortunately for me I commute to and from work on a train which means I've got plenty of time to ponder life's mysteries.

Every now and again you'll come across someone that says search engine rankings aren't important. What most of these people are really trying to say is that rankings make a poor measure for success. I agree that other measures such as organic traffic or conversions are more appropriate. However, I think that checking rankings regularly is still important.

It looks like WordPress 2.5 and Patrick Altoft's Crawl Rate Tracker aren't 100% compatible. Patrick knows about the problem, but doesn't really provide detailed instructions on how to fix the problem. For those installing the plugin after upgrading to WordPress 2.5, I believe this database query will fix the problem.

It's been a while since I coined a new phrase, but some good conversations recently have inspired me. Today's new phrase even has a cool acronym although I've exceeded the three letters that most acronyms seem to adhere to. Anyway, I've been thinking about search engine optimization diminishing returns on investment dollars or SEO DRoID. Long winded (perhaps unnecessarily), but catchy, no?

One of the common themes you'll hear when talking to reputable SEO agencies or consultants is that no one can promise #1 rankings. Such statements about no guarantees are false though. You see, I can guarantee you a number 1 ranking in Google for almost ANY search term you want. And I can do it without resorting to black hat techniques. The problem is, the ROI for achieving that #1 ranking would probably bankrupt you. Kind of puts a damper on things, doesn't it?

I was recently directed to post by Chris Brogan titled Scaling Yourself. In the article Chris described various approaches to focusing on the important tasks and ignoring time wasters. While I don't think what he described is truly scaling since he's simply doing less in the same amount of time rather than doing more in the same amount of time, his thoughts prompted me to think about scaling as it applies to SEO work.

Many people seem fond of declaring that traditional / old-school / cookie-cutter SEO i.e. on-page tactics such as modifying title tags, content, and links, is dead. These people are wrong. Even in recent months I've yet to have a client whose site didn't need these on-page tactics. More importantly, I've NEVER worked on a site where such changes didn't result in a significant improvement in rankings and traffic. So why is there such animosity towards basic SEO? I imagine it is part of what consultants and agencies are doing to differentiate themselves from everyone else. After all, if you're not doing anything different than that of someone charging half your price, why should you be hired over the cheaper solution?

Nobody likes to waste money and SEO estimates sometimes come with sticker shock. So when a company requests an SEO pilot project (3 months or less) I understand their perspective and desire to make sure they don't throw good money after bad. The problem is that SEO is not something that necessarily has an immediate result. Sure, sometimes you can remove a bad entry from a robots.txt file and suddenly see more organic traffic to a site, but more often than not there's significant analysis and ramp up such that the first set of recommendations takes weeks to be implemented. And by the time they are implemented, there could be less than a month left in the pilot engagement. If talks of a renewal begin a few weeks prior to the end of the current contract, you've got a window of just one or two weeks in which to show significant improvement with rankings/traffic/conversions. Good luck with that…

Original image from bLaugh

Back in October of 2007, some significant changes were afoot with the PageRank scores assigned to various high-profile sites (check out Search Engine Journal for a recap of which sites were initially hit). This change, mostly a reduction in PageRank scores, prompted a flurry of blog posts and further intesified the debate about paid links and Google's disdain for them. I'm going to leave the big picture discussion to others who have already thrown their hats into the ring and have made arguments for both sides that are at least as insightful as anything I could come up with. Instead, I want to zero in on one detail that struck a chord with me when I read on Search Engine Roundtable that Matt Cutts made public his belief that Toolbar PageRank should and would (hopefully) disappear. I think doing so would be a mistake. That and I wanted to be the first to write about PageRank in 2008!

Those that are new to the SEO game and those that don't do SEO for a living often want to know how many keywords they should have. This question is one that intuitively seems valid, but is also one that I believe indicates an SEO approach with the wrong emphasis. What's disappointing is when SEO professionals (agencies and consultants alike) don't step up to educate their clients and instead go along with whatever the client arbitrarily decides is right be it a desire to optimize for 10, 20, or 100 keywords.

Those bitten by the SEO bug and blessed with enough free time to build their own sites are often confronted with a question that doesn't have an easy answer. The question is whether, from an SEO perspective, it is better to focus on a single, all-encompassing site or to create multiple, very niche sites. I've dealt with this issue myself recently.

During a routine search today I came across this set of results.

In position 6 you can see an example of a URL with double dashes in between keywords. Obviously the site owners felt that keywords in the URL were important for their objectives and by using double dashes it's pretty clear they didn't care about type-in traffic. Presumably they also don't expect people to link to the site since the URL has a very spammy feel.

I've been considering switching web hosting companies because my current host has an annoying habit of upgrading software that breaks WordPress. Calling it a habit may be a little strong, but it's happened twice in as many months. During my search for a new host, I came across several recommendations for a MediaTemple. During a review of their offerings I came across a good example of poor reputation management.

I was doing some research for a new client and stumbled upon another SEO vendor's web site. I had heard of this company before, but I had never delved too deeply into their site, but today I decided to do just that. What intrigued me the most was finding a page of sample rankings that this company had achieved for its clients. Pretty cool, I thought. Then I started laughing.

I just got through answering all 75 questions of SEOmoz's SEO Quiz. I hate tests as much as the next guy. Well, to me more accurate, I hate tests where I don't get a perfect score as much as the next guy. Still, I couldn't resist taking this one. There are, after all, few public measures of one's SEO knowledge.

Ranking reports are a staple of any search engine optimization effort. That isn't to say that rankings are the most important success metric, but rather they serve as an easy-to-understand and objective measure of how changes to a site are perceived by search engines. And so whether you're tracking 10 keywords or 1000, you want your ranking reports to accurately reflect reality.

Back in July Matt Cutts started a poll to gather feedback on what features people wanted added to the Google Webmaster Tools console. I imagine that Google will ultimately include many of the requests, but I found it interesting to see what people are most concerned about.

Some web site owners, both big a small, still have the perception that SEO is a one-shot deal. You put in a few months of work and then move on to some other project. While it's true that increases in traffic can be had with just several months work, growth will stop shortly after the SEO efforts stop. Of course your first inclination will be to dismiss my assertion because it's self-serving. After all, if SEO was a one-time event, I'd be out of work in short order. The problem is that I can't prove to you what happens when SEO activities end so instead I'll have to settle for describing 3 areas that you can hopefully related to.

By the time an SEO project comes your way, the site you're optimizing probably already exists which means the domain name has already been chosen. However, sometimes you get in on a project early such that you can provide some input on a domain name. Generally the choice of domain starts with answering the question of whether you want a brand or descriptive domain. Both have their advantages.

If you live in North America and do search engine optimization (SEO) you, like me, probably work in a bubble full of English web sites. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but recently I was forced to prepare business justification for translating an English site to multiple languages. The question I was tasked to answer was how much search volume is there for a list of keywords in Spanish, Japanese, French, German, and Italian.

A few years ago when Microsoft introduced its .NET platform it also upgraded the languages and functionality available to web developers. One of the new features is called viewstate which is automatically generated code, hidden from users, that stores a user's current session data. Sounds good, right?

For about a week now I've been evaluating the Premium Membership offered by SEOmoz. I've already concluded that without a doubt the fee (at least the monthly one) is well worth the content that comes with the membership. However, up until a couple of days ago I had yet to look at the three search engine optimization (SEO) guides available for download.

Yesterday I spent some time playing with the Crawl Test tool provided by the SEO experts at SEOmoz. Today I'm going to review another one of their tools — Term Target. The purpose of this tool is to examine a web page and determine what keywords appear most prominently with different weights applied to where in the HTML those keywords are. So, for example, a keyword in an h1 tag may be given more weight than a keyword in the main body copy.

This past weekend I signed up for the premium membership option offered by SEOmoz. My overall assessment of the membership benefits was positive with the information being worth the cost of membership. Although I spent a good amount of time reading, I didn't spend too much time looking at the SEO tools that come with the membership. I started to remedy that today by examining the Crawl Test SEO tool.

I've been a fan of SEOmoz, in general, and Rand Fishkin, in particular, for quite a while. In fact, a search of this blog will reveal posts where I gush embarrassingly about the great things the SEOmoz team does. Up until today I've avoided signing up for the premium membership that the site offers. Yeah, I could come up with various logically sounding reasons why I didn't want to pay, but basically I just hate being ripped off even if the dollar amount is less than I'd spend for dinner at a mediocre restaurant.

Back in May I wrote about how the NY Times was rebundling their content to expand their keyword targets. At the helm of NY Times' search engine optimization efforts is Marshall Simmonds whose abilities are well known in the SEO industry and so this tactic was generally accepted to be an effective one.

Search engine optimizers get a lot of flak from various people claiming that we are ruining the web by filling it with spam. We are somehow enemy #1 of the web and of search engines alike. I, of course, have a different perspective. I believe that Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the other search engines actually LIKE and I daresay NEED SEOs.

A long time ago (in Internet time that is) I made the mistake of understating the value of a domain name that exactly matches a search term. Part of the problem was that it was hard to find a collection of domains that were similar and had legitimate content to compare. And while my opinion changed over time, I still didn't have a good example, until now.

It's been a light reading week for me so I only came across a couple of quotes related to search engine optimization (SEO) that I thought were worth sharing. One is humorous and the other is likely to be controversial.

Yesterday I wrote about a great article from the NY Times about Google's ranking algorithm and the confirmation it provided of the Google sandbox phenomenon. The article, at 4 pages, is chock-full of other goodies though, one of which confirms a tip about optimizing for local search.

It's common for companies to do business in multiple locations around the world. On the search engine optimization (SEO) front, one of the goals for these global sites is to achieve high rankings regardless of the particular geographic-specific search engine being used e.g. Google.com vs. Google.co.uk.

Ask 10 search engine optimizers if they know the difference between a strategy and a tactic and I bet all 10 of them will nod their heads. If you then asked those same 10 people to give you an example of a strategy, 9 of them would in fact describe tactics instead and not even realize they did so.

Not too long ago I posted several quotes from various search engine optimizers and marketers that I thought were particularly interesting or humorous. This next batch of quotes, although from different people that the first batch, still aims to provide a little insight into the processes and personalities of the folks in the search space.

I like to read a lot online. And as a professional search engine optimizer, I often read the blogs of others that are involved with both SEO and SEM. During the course of all of this reading, I often come across comments from people that are interesting because of the insight they provide in to the people making the comments. Here are 5 direct quotes from people around the web.

Just a heads up to my 5250 subscribers (number has been rounded up, way up) that I have switched my RSS feed to display the entire contents of the post rather than a snippet. Note that this change may make your reader mark all my posts as new. Sorry about that!

I recently met Mike Levin of HitTail at Darren Rowse's ProBlogger meet-up in NYC. The purpose of the HitTail service is to offer "Keyword suggestions tailored to your website." Anyone who does SEO knows that keyword research and selection is an important aspect of attracting traffic so a service that promises to make such tasks easier is worth a look.

An SEO company I haven't heard about before, eTrafficJams, has managed to stir the pot recently with both SEO's and non-SEO's alike. They've done this by introducing SEO programs that are guaranteed to bring results every month or that month's fee is waived. At first I thought this was a risky model. However, the move I thought about the more I realized that it can be made to work. Here's how.

I do a lot of blog reading on the weekend. That's particularly true when it's cold and cloudy outside. This weekend's SEO reading includes a few gems that I thought would be worth listing.

Taking an existing web site and optimizing the copy for search engines can be a daunting task requiring more creativity from the optimizer than one might expect. Those new to SEO and even experts sometimes are tempted to just dive in and start adding keywords here and there, focusing too much on things like keyword density. This activity is fueled by the belief that success is measure purely by increased rankings while completely ignoring the negative effects to conversion that bad copy can have on a user.

Every year there are optimization techniques that become generally accepted best practices. However, before an idea becomes accepted, it sits in this intermediate state where enough evidence of its value in increasing rankings is lacking. Many of these items are treated as signals of quality.

WordTracker has just put out a press release with their picks for the Oscars. Their predictions are based on looking at search volume for the various nominees. While the predictive nature of tools like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery is important for any search engine optimization (SEO) program to be successful, I think WordTracker's current use is flawed.

Now you're probably wondering how I could write a post about making money from offering free software. The basic idea is that you write some software. Offer the software for free and even consider making it open source. If your software is good, a year or so from the release date you'll be able to make a boat load of cash from the web site that hosts the free software.

In my post yesterday I wrote that an important thing to understand about SEO is that you win by being better than your competition. I had a chance today to talk about this idea with a co-worker of mine which in turn got me to thinking about what sport could be used as a metaphor for SEO. It wasn't easy coming up with one.

Part of what I do is provide recommendations to site owners about how they should optimize their web sites for search engines. Often this list of recommendations is quite long and made up of items some of which are relatively easy to implement and some of which will require quite a bit of work. As you can imagine, there is sometimes push back from the site owner regarding the high effort items. Usually this resistance is phrased like, "Do I really need to do item #43?"

Just a quick post to note that it is possible to have a new site obtain a PageRank of 7 in just a couple of months. Need proof? Check out the PR for Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land. It's a 7 and the site launched in the middle of November. Thanks to Small Business SEM for noticing this one.

One of the basic premises of search engine optimization (SEO) is that you want to maximize the "good stuff" on a page while minimizing the "bad stuff". That's right, SEO, at least the on-page efforts, pretty much boils down to that premise.

If you've been involved with search engine optimization (SEO) for even short periods of time, you've probably thought about duplicate content. And while you can fix problems on web sites you manage, getting the owner of scraper-sites to stop their practices is next to impossible. The good news is that there is something you can do to increase the chances that your site will be treated as the original source of content. Read the rest of this entry »

If you've ever done research into search engine optimization (SEO) you're first thought was probably that it doesn't leave much room for creativity. Injecting keywords into copy, renaming URLs, updating meta descriptions, and pulling together ranking reports makes the task seem quite structured and robotic. Well, you were half right.

In a previous post I described the 302 temporary redirect from the blog that originally had most of the content that now appears on this site. The idea of the 302 redirect is to make sure that my other site's pages don't get removed from Google's index before the content on this site is included. You'd think both of these evens would happen at the same time, but there's no way to know for sure that they will.

When I set up this blog I used the Cutline WordPress theme from Chris Pearson. It's a visually appealing design that had the modern look I was after. Still, as I'm sure all designers know, there's no design that can please all people all of the time and so I set out to tweak the theme to suit my particular style.

For at least the last couple of months, there has been some buzz about a ranking penalty imposed by Google. Sites that are being penalized are finding that search phrases for which they ranked near the top are now being ranked for those same phrases on page 4 i.e. position 31 or worse.

I haven't paid as much attention to the world of tagging content on the web as I should have. It just became one of those things that went on my list and never moved up high enough for me to do anything about. My loss really, as I believe there are some good opportunities for boosting a site's popularity and traffic with tags.

Much has been written about the long tail of search, a term brought to the collective consciousness by Chris Anderson of Wired. The term refers to the belief that there's more to be gained by going after niche markets via search and other means rather than trying to go after the larger, but more competitive, interests of web users.

A teaser at MarketingProfs (no link since it's a two sentence teaser) mentions a new book titled Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master. The teaser goes on to suggest that 50 metrics is quite a lot to keep track of and that web marketers are likely going to want to zero in on a much smaller set of data. This got me thinking.

On July 28, I Digg user submitted one of my blog postings to Digg. The following day, the submission had reached over 1000 "diggs" or votes from other users. I'm going to describe some of the results from receiving this Digg.

A while back I wrote about how I discovered that portions of my site were being plagiarized by other web site owners. In that same post I described the creation of a Plagiarism Hall of Shame where I included screenshots, contact info, and commentary about the offending site. My hope was that eventually the site owners would find my site and react to my accusations. Well my plan worked.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book fame has released a Firefox extension that provides interesting SEO-related data in search engine results from Google and Yahoo. I just got through playing with this extension.

Not too long ago, most people in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry would've recommended that web pages be no larger than 100 KB in size. For the most part this seemed like a reasonable number and most people didn't complain because who makes pages that big anyway!?

I was recently interviewed by a local paper about the rise in importance of search engines and search engine optimization (SEO). Check out the snippet below. My name appears at the bottom of the left column.

In addition to this site, I run several others all of which are fairly small i.e. less than 100 pages. During part of the regular SEO maintenance I do, I decided to check on the status of these other sites in Google. It seems that pages from some of my other sites have somehow been relegated to the supplemental index.

Redirects are one of the things that people misunderstand when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The biggest problem is that they're often implemented incorrectly. Next in line is that most people don't know when to use them.

On one of the search engine marketing digests I subscribe to there's a debate raging on whether the Google Sandbox exists or not. In case you haven't heard of it, the Google Sandbox is what people use to explain why new web sites fail to rank highly in Google's search results for even the least competitive search terms. The idea is that Google puts new web sites in to a "sandbox" for some unknown length of time before it gives the web site its due

Several months ago, a subsidiary of my current employer created a very robust recipe search tool with over 10,000 recipes. The availability of this tool resulted in some excitement from various other business groups because they wanted to incorporate it in to their web sites. When I heard this I thought I should monitor the situation to see what would happen with these different search tools because the sites were, in effect, deploying duplicate content and which the general belief is that search engines don't like.

You've got to see this check from Google for over $100,000. Is it mine? Nope. Do you think I'd be sitting here writing a blog entry if it was!? I'd be too busy doing nothing somewhere sunny.

There's a new tool available for checking keyword rankings. It does two things that my current keyword tracking favorite from Digital Point doesn't. Read the rest of this entry »

This posting serves as my entry in to the Shoemoney SEO contest. Read the rest of this entry »

Not all statistics are worth tracking. The key to figuring which ones are is by answering the question of what will you do with the information? If a number is high, low, decreasing, increasing, or staying flat, what action will you take? If the answer is nothing, then there's no point in noting the statistic. Don't waste your time with things that are interesting, but not valuable. If you do, you will easily become overwhelmed with the maintenance of all your reports. Read the rest of this entry »

If you've run a web site for some time you've probably wondered just how successful it is. While some measures based on sales and registrations can point you in the right direction, other statistics need to be mined from your web server's log files. These log files track every hit to a web site and when pieced together, can offer insights about your web site's recent and historical activity. Read the rest of this entry »

I was asked recently asked whether the URL for a web site made a difference when it comes to SEO. More specifically, I was asked whether it was better to have BackyardLiving.com or BackyardLivingMagazine.com for a magazine about all things related to making your backyard enjoyable place. And as with most things SEO-related, I answered yes and no. People really like it when I give them answers like that. Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to improve search engine results and reduce the impact of search engine spammers, Google tweaked their algorithms. These changes, although secret, were soon detected by web masters the world over and became known as the Google sandbox. Read the rest of this entry »

WebmasterBrain.com has been running an experiment to determine which of the top search engines are the most relevant. There are likely a few unscientific aspects to the experiment that affect the fairness of the test, but as an informal examination, the results are worth looking at. Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post, I wrote about how a commonly misspelled term (Search Engine Optimization Specalist) had very little competition in the search engines and was therefore a good phrase to target if you're in the SEO business. Read the rest of this entry »

It's somewhat rare, but sometimes you can strike SEO-gold by looking at misspellings. I wrote about this topic previously in a posting about the Every Day with Rachael Ray site for which I was doing SEO work. More recently, I stumbled on to a phrase that is often misspelled, searched for frequently, and not at all competitive. There isn't much more that I could ask for! Read the rest of this entry »

Part of the many tasks associated with search engine optimization (SEO) is measuring the success of your efforts. This measurement can take the form of increased traffic or increased conversions. More simply though is just keeping track of how your site ranks in the search engines for the keywords that you've chosen. Unfortunately, keeping track of search engine rankings can become very tedious once the list of keywords grows beyond a handful or the number of sites under your care increases. Read the rest of this entry »

The brain trust at Google never ceases to amaze me. They keep releasing free tools that are not only of interest to those that run web sites, but are often free. That's a really good value proposition that most companies fail to achieve. What's even more amazing is that all the free tools indirectly roll-up up in to a small number of fee-based tools that has turned Google in to a company with an $80 billion market cap based on REAL profits. Here's a quick run down of some the more popular web master tools. Read the rest of this entry »

I learned recently that Yahoo removes trailing slashes from URLs. Someone with the alias Yahoo Mike on one of the search engine forums posted an explanation for this behavior. Read the rest of this entry »

The standard for web page navigation is create an image-based menu system that changes in some way as the user rolls the mouse pointer over each. These feedback is an important consideration from a usability perspective. However, the use images in the navigation system is often sited as a missed opportunity for SEO (search engine optimization) since the search engines are unable to "read" the text on the image and are therefore unable to associate a meaning with the destination page. Read the rest of this entry »

I'm involved with a project to promote a new publication from Reader's Digest and Rachael Ray. My particular role in this project is dealing with the SEO aspects related to having the magazine's web site rank highly for all things Rachael Ray. Much of the work is standard SEO that will just take time and effort as most SEO initiatives do. But there's one piece of the puzzle that I'm still working out a strategy for. Read the rest of this entry »

I just got through joining the Google Sitemaps program. This program (in beta) from Google allows a site owner to submit a structured list of all URLs for a web site. Along with the URLs, you can specify the relative importance of one page to another, how frequently a page is updated, and when that last update to the page occurred. Read the rest of this entry »

These are SEO guidelines, not rules. Project specific considerations may be more important than SEO. These are also basic rules. If you're already doing all of these, it's time for a more thorough review of your SEO practices to figure out what to do next. Read the rest of this entry »

Search engine optimization or SEO is critical to the success of most web sites. Large companies with deep pockets can afford to build a brand through the use of TV and magazine ads. On the other hand, small and medium-sized companies can get a better return on their marketing dollars by providing relevant content on their web sites and then fine-tuning that content. The goal of this fine-tuning is to appear in the first top 10 results of a search when a user searches Google, Yahoo, AOL, or MSN. Read the rest of this entry »