Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Yeah, sorry to say it, but please — don’t get hung up on your rankings. Just because you are number one in Google for your search doesn’t mean you’re number one in Google for your customer’s search.

As I mentioned in my post on personalized search, Google customizes your search results based on your search history.  Test it yourself. Google something. Now find a friend and Google the same thing on her computer. Most likely your results are different… unless you’re both in the same field and mostly do the same searches.

The point is (and I do generally have one) — your site content has to sell your product, whether you show up above the fold or below in the rankings. If the 5 sites above you don’t help a searcher solve his or her problem and you DO, you get the sale…and the 5 competitors get the honor of “being ranked top 5″ Great. Let them take that to the bank while you close another sale.

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Google announced on its official blog last week that it is “extending personalized search to signed-out users worldwide.”

Generally, this means that Google will use a “cookie” to customize your search results. If you often search for Internet Marketing Services and usually choose NetStrategies (which you do, of course), Google will remember your preferences and might display NetStrategies higher in your search results.

Google has utilized personal search for signed-in users for several years. If you have a Google account (gmail, etc.) and are logged in to search, your results are personalized to reflect your preferences. In an SEO course I took last year, the instructor used the example of searching for Java — depending on what you click most often, your results could contain mostly coffee sites, programming sites, or tourism sites. This change only brings that personalization to all users.

Keep in mind, though, that in addition to changing the way YOUR results are displayed, this will obviously change the way your potential customers’ results are displayed. So how can you ensure they still find you?

Be proactive! Follow best practices around writing your content and structuring your site. Your rankings may change user to user, but when a potential customer clicks on your site, if your page answers their question or solves their problem, you’ve taken the first step toward converting that searcher to a customer.

Remember that rankings should be viewed as a trend and not as a hard number. If you see your site pages fall week by week in your own search results, it’s time to review your content and SEO strategy. Let us know if you need any help!

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Google continues to revolutionize the way we get information.

I’ve been a reliable reader of the Washington Post for close to 15 years. Home delivery, read it each morning on Metro…even drove 20 miles to pick it up weekly (at a huge markup) when I lived in Central Virginia. Moving back to Northern Virginia 3 years ago, the very first thing I did was go online and order a 7-days-a-week subscription.

Now I’m faced with recycling papers I can’t find time to read. Google, the Post and the NY Times are making it easier for me to stay on top of the issues.

According to the article in yesterdays’ Washington Post, the three entities have created Living Stories. As mentioned on the page, “Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritized on one URL. You can now quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features without long waits for pages to load.”

I can quickly scan top headlines and read those that interest me.

Clicking a link takes me to a full page of information about that topic.

I find that I can quickly and easily read articles of interest, and I plan to visit the page regularly. What do you think? Can Google save newspapers?

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Chris Crum of WebProNews.com recently explained bing’s link building policies. It’s a nice summary of bing’s “dos” and “don’ts.”

What stands out to me is that this lists mirrors the best practices we currently follow for optimizing site pages for Google. Best practices should be universal, so it appears your efforts, whether for bing or Google, won’t hurt the other. As Crum states, “Most of the stuff [bing's Rick] DeJarnette shared is nothing any savvy search marketer is not already aware of.”

If you are new to optimization, print Crum’s article and hang it on your wall. If you’re currently link building, you may still learn something new to help you correct your course.

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

My final Tuesday session at SMXEast in New York addressed “Universal & Blended Search Opportunities.”  Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land, moderated the session. Highlights from the speakers include:

Todd Friesen, VP of Search, Position Technologies
Nobody was using news, blog, images and vertical services directly so Google jammed them into the regular search results. Blogs don’t show up as much as news, video results. Optimize your titles for SEO – use a keyword or two at the beginning at the title.  Optimize your images!

Eric Papczun, VP of Client Services, Performics
Take full advantage of how to exploit the results to dominate the page results for your brand. How do we tell our story before others try to tell it for us (possibly negatively).  BE PROACTIVE!!!! If you have a quicklink, see what is on that page. If it loads slowly people may bounce off.  Constantly create news about yourself and refresh it often.  As news updates throughout the day, push it out.  Attack the noise around your brand.

Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo!
Blended search is all about little doorways that go to the content of the web. You can leave it in the search engines’ hands or take it into your hands. Use Search Monkey – blending data inside a result – partners to enable you to manipulate your listing in the yahoo search results: reviews, pictures, social info, etc. Also use Search Pad — can tell when you’re doing research and enables you to add notes that you can print out and take with you or post on Facebook, etc.

Jack Menzel, Google Product Manager, Universal Search, Google
It’s all about relevance. It’s not a window for people to abuse.  Get people the answer to queries fast, comprehensive, and best summary of the content.  Things will become more and more local, which is a source of a lot of quality win.
Search is far from solved. There are still lots of things that need to be fixed. Make sure Google can find your content!

As searches become more sophisticated, the engines have to be able to provide the best information to answer the query. Universal or blended search provides video, blogs, pictures, etc. This session provided useful information on optimizing that content.

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

An afternoon session on Tuesday at SMXEast in New York allowed us to “Ask the SEOs.” This session, moderated by Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Searsch Engine Land, gave us the opportunity to get opinions from and discuss SEO questions with some very talented Internet marketers. The speakers included Greg Boser, President and CEO, 3 Dog Media; Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.; Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land; Todd Friesen, President, Oilman SEO; Rae Hoffman, owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting; Stephan Spencer, President & CEO, Netconcepts; and Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book. Notes from the Q&A include :

Duplicate content that’s scraped – how to deal with this?

• Stephan: Make sure you link to the canonical URL of an article within an article.
• Vanessa: Make sure the links are absolute. Go to google DMCA page to report scrapers.
• Greg: Remember the site with the most juice wins. Scraper stuff is spammers, so you usually won’t see a negative impact.
• Rae: If a scraper site is outranking you, you aren’t doing your SEO right.
• Bruce: File online to get a Federal electronic copyright number issued ($45). If you send your info out, the site that is syndicated may outrank you.
• Stephan: With a registered copyright, you can sue for statutory damages.

Google caffeine thoughts.

• Vanessa: Primarily an infrastructure change, not a rankings change. The new infrastructure may be allowing more content to be indexable, which is what could be affecting rankings.
• Todd: A lot of universal search things seem to have changed.
• Greg: Stronger trend toward using homepage instead of internal pages that may rank on regular Google … kind of like Alta Vista, may be returning best site instead of best page.
• Bruce: Found pages in caffeine that are older than pages in normal Google index. Regular index is being updated faster. If you’re seeing rankings change, your competitor could have been spidered but you haven’t been.
• Vanessa: If so, once they launch it, it might balance out.

What are the factors that influence Google Suggest – when you type and Google gives suggestions?

• Todd: Search volume, spikes, trends.
• Aaron: Stuff on Stumbleupon and viral sites that get thousands of views a day.
• Vanessa: Take advantage of suggest – optimize for the things that Google Suggest brings up.

What’s the difference between Alexa rank and Google PageRank – why are they so disparate?

• Vanessa: They are the same because they’re magical, mythical numbers.
• Stephan: You can download a piece of software to improve one but not the other.
• Danny: It’s as if two reviewers give you two different reviews.
• Vanessa: Based on if you download the toolbar from Alexa, so certain types of sites have higher rankings. Google pagerank is vaguely based on value of links. It’s not updated very often and not super accurate. Search engines don’t use Alexa at all for anything.
• Aaron: Link diversity is going to usually win.
• Rae: If you’re spending time trying to figure out value, you’re wasting time you could be spending improving your site.

Breadcrumbs – are important. all agree!

How do you determine if a site is authoritative?

• Stephan: Does it have sitelinks for nonbrand keywords?
• Vanessa: Does the site get a lot of people to it that would want to go to your site?
• Danny: A domain can have authority and transmit that to other sites.
• Greg: The time factor is the one thing that can’t be fudged. Old sites are good.

Thank you to these SEOers for sharing their opinions with the group.

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

Tuesday’s sessions at SMXEast in New York continued with “Ask the Search Engines: Best Practices Edition.” Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land moderated, and notes from the presentations and Q&A with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing include:

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.

• If you need to bring your site offline for temporary maintenance, what’s the best way to do it? Return a 503 with a helpful message. Google will later recrawl the URL. Google will not index the content of the 503 (the preexisting content will be available in search results).
• How do you help bots crawl your site more efficiently with if-modified-since? Respond when appropriate with 304 “Not modified.”
• Which file(s) might be good to disallow from crawlers? individual login pages and calendars
• What action(s) can reduce load time (and thus increase user happiness)? order the external scripts and CSS on your pages efficiently (external scripts load serially – all other loading is blocked -  **stylesheets above external scripts allow parallel loading – much faster)** compress images
• What is the possible result of this implementation of “other-language” versions of a page using rel=”canonical”? This can be a problem if a french searcher is searching for a site. She’ll still see english version.

Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Microsoft

• Secure Your Website – no one talks about it. Everyone takes it for granted.
• Spammers target spiky queries that follow popular events and capitalize on the popularity to make money. They hack popular sites, use the link, and then spam the queries that target those queries.
• Blogs and forums are user-generated content, which makes them nonsecure and vulnerable if not secured/monitored regularly.
• Links on hacked pages may lead to a fake malware page which actually loads viruses if you click for the antivirus.
• Forums and blogs are spam magnets.

Q&A with Maile, Sasi, and Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo! Inc.

• Using javascript to fool the search engines is a recipe for disaster.
• Safest to use text links.
• In bing, linking out is NOT part of the algorithm.
• Google and bing never supported the keywords tag. Yahoo, within last 3 months, doesn’t support keywords tag. They were NEVER a major ranking factor of the search engines.
• Good ranking factors: GOOD TEXT, informative and unique, content should make sense. KEYWORDS in the title tag, in the page itself (body copy), (in past – higher on the page was helpful), presence of the words in the links or near the links that lead to your page.
• How to move a website to a new domain without affecting its rankings: webmaster central blog – best practices for moving your site, webmaster tools – change of address; 301s
• Javascript & ability to executive has been a long time coming and they are treading lightly to ensure no negative side effects. only certain types of events are found to be safe.
• Canonical tag transferrs all link properties — it’s true.
• Whatever the 301 will do for you, the canonical will do for you.
• If you change hosting, it doesn’t matter – it won’t affect your rankings unless your hoster is slow. It doesn’t matter what your backend is if your structure is the same.
• Display none by itself isn’t blackhat, but it’s walking a thin line.
• Anytime that money is changing hands, you’re safest using nofollow.

I think it’s great that reps from the big-3 search engines took the time to come answer questions from Internet marketers. It makes it easier to play by the rules when you get additional opportunity to learn what the rules are!

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

Tuesday’s sessions at SMXEast in New York began with Shari Thurow and “Search Engine Friendly Web Design.” Shari is the Founder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive and has a background in design. Takeaways include:

• You build a website for your users, not the search engines.
• Use industry directories, such as findlaw.com and Thomas register
• You must communicate well with the engines so they can communicate well with the searchers.
• Remember basic rules of web design for searchers: site should be easy to read, navigate, and find; should be consistent in layout, design, and labeling, and should be quick to load.
• Remember basic rules of web design for crawlers: spider must be able to index text, follow links, and measure popularity.
• Need to accommodate searcher behavior
• 3 equal parts: keyword-rich text, site and page architecture, and high-quality external link development
• Usability tests will let you know if visitors can tell what your site is about
• If search engines can’t access your pages, those pages won’t rank
• Search engines can follow flash-based links but they’re not very good at it, and they’re improving at a snail’s pace
• splash pages are not search engine friendly and usually are not user friendly
• The first things eyes go to a on webpage is movement
• People don’t come to a website to see how wonderful you are. They come to your website to see what you can do for them.
• Press release PDFs are ok on your site, but you have to optimize them the same as you would a webpage.

Shari offered up some great commonsense usability tips, and I’ve just started reading her book “Search Engine Visibility.”

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

My final Monday session at SMXEast in New York included the all-important topic of link building. Though it was a bootcamp/basics class, link building is often considered a difficult part of SEO. Attending the class gave me a few new pointers and useful information.

The session was moderated by Disa Johnson, the CEO of SearchReturn. Notes from each speaker include:

Debra Mastaler, President, Allicance-Link
There were 76 billion searches on Google in July 2009, and 25 billion of those were in the US. Relevance to a subject puts you into a topical community.  There are 4 main link types: credibility, content, smo, and paid, BUT if you use paid links you go against the terms of service. Begin your link building as if you had a business on main street: get a link from the chamber of commerce, charities, organizations, alumni organizations, etc. Get listed in directories. See how other people are selling themselves first. Each element of your site has a directory: articles, software, rss, newsletters, blogs, etc.  Always place your original content on your site first and then distribute elsewhere. Be sure bios use links back to site. Focus on traditional content link generation tactics.

Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com
There are hundreds of tools for link building, including links pages, social sites, etc. There are only two audiences, though: people and search engines. Link building has to be customized to a particulare site, and you have to use a well-rounded multiple-strategy approach. Remember: the easier a link is to get, the less value it will have to a search engine.

I really enjoyed listening to Eric Ward, who was link building before it became vital. I appreciate that he will not work with certain less-than-savory types of sites, and I think his nugget about ease of getting a link in relationship to value of a link is something all of us should remember.

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!

]]> http://www.netstrategies.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/link-building-fundamentals-smxeast-session-notes/feed 2 http://www.netstrategies.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/actional-seo-insights-from-analytics-data-%e2%80%93-smxeast-session-notes http://www.netstrategies.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/actional-seo-insights-from-analytics-data-%e2%80%93-smxeast-session-notes#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:08:46 +0000 Stacey Morgan Smith http://www.netstrategies.com/blog/?p=1147 Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Monday afternoon I left the “SEO track” and visited the Analytics room at SMXEast in New York. I spend a lot of time looking at my customers’ analytics to plan the next steps in their SEO, so I attended the the “Actionable SEO Insights from Analytics Data” session.

The session was moderated by Chris Sherman, the Executive Editor of Search Engine Land. Notes from each speaker include:

John Maxson, Manager, Natural Search Optimization, iCrossing
Challenges with using analytics include the difficulty of verifying accuracy, the data is sometimes too complicated to analyze, and one can’t drill into the data. Actions: when you find strong-performing keywords, add additional content around those keywords. For poorly performing keywords, there probably isn’t enough content or content isn’t really focused on that theme. Monitor your own site like a competitor’s site. You may not always be aware of changes to your own site.

Taylor Pratt, Senior Search Specialist, nFusion
Use site search to see what language customers are using and if they are converting for that language. For more keywords, look at paid search keywords and how they are converting. Analyze your referring domains. Don’t just look at top traffic content. Look at weekly, biweekly, or monthly TREND reporting, not numbers. Form a hypothesis and test it.

Mike Tekula, President, Unstuck Digital
Look at the metrics for longtail keywords. Per-visit value is priceless. Look at keyword data – bounce rate PLUS pages per visit. Look at users who viewed X pages to find keywords that refer most engaged users.

In this session I picked up a few new ideas for using analytics. If you aren’t using analytics in your own search engine optimization, you aren’t seeing the whole picture. Analytics will help you get a baseline measurement, help you measure performance, and help you correct your course.

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from natural search!