The link pointed to an article called “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” by Derek Powazek. In a nutshell it is tirade against Search Engine Optimization and companies offering SEO which includes our company, Anduro Marketing. I couldn’t resist reading the post and responding.

First Derek gives a quick history of the search engine industry:

“First came the web, and it was a mess.” “Then came the search engines. First primitive indexes of dumb keywords, then Google…” “The ascendancy of Google has meant that, if your goal is to get the most eyeballs possible (as any ad-supported media business’ goal is), then prominent placement in the search engine results became a top priority.”

Not a bad history actually. He should post that to Twitter. But then Derek loads up the page with name calling and loaded language to emphasize his point. His labels for Search Engine Optimizers include: “goat sacrificers”, “snake oil salesmen” and “a new breed of con man”. He then makes 3 points and elaborates on each.

1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.
2. SEO is poisoning the web.
3. The One True Way.

Actually, Derek is right on each point but beyond the basic point Derek seems tarnished, tainted and terribly mislead or misinformed.

1. SEO is Obvious.
In many ways Derek is correct – much of SEO is obvious. Picking keywords, adding them to web pages and getting any type of link back to the website is free and relatively easy. But so is cooking a burger or changing oil in a car. I can do both but I don’t except occasionally. Why? Lots of reasons. I don’t have time. I’m too lazy. And the chef at BrokenCity does a much better job. Besides, I don’t have buns, burgers, condiments, fries and a stove at the office. Why should I cook a burger at lunch time when I can pay someone to do it and talk with customers, colleagues and friends instead? Sheesh.

So what are customers buying when they hire a firm to optimize their website? Where is the value in hiring a company like ours to optimize their website and boost the home page on search engines? The answer is simple. Our customers don’t want to spend time doing tasks that would take them a month of Sundays. We can do SEO faster, better and often cheaper. We have the tools, processes, and know-how to get the job done quickly and effectively.

One of the basic principles of running a successful business is to do what you do well and focus on that. People buy value. If you focus on providing value then customers will buy. But if you spend all your time learning and doing things you don’t have the aptitude, training and skills for then you won’t be able to provide quality products on time at a reasonable price. Trying to do everything sounds like failure to me.

Let me give you an example. Let’s take Dell – a large company with a large budget for brochures and online ads. One would assume that their website would automatically work well with the search engines. Not so. A couple years ago we got an email from a business manager for the business unit focusing on small and medium business. He thought there was untapped opportunities for Dell to rank well on search engines. His rationale was that paid ads on Google cost money and high listings on the organic side of Google are free. Good point. We “messed around” with the URLs, source code, anchor text, internal links, external links and strange things started to happened. Pages on the Dell site start ranking at the top of the SERPs. Dell.com is still in top spot for “business laptops”, beating out 25 million other pages. It’s in 3rd spot, out performing 109 million other pages, for “servers”. The end result – our contact at Dell got promoted. Nice.

But what about small companies? What value do they get from SEO? About 5 years ago Wayne Thomas came to us. He runs a small company called CleanSuite Software Inc. His company produces software for dry cleaning businesses. He wanted to have more visitors come to his website. He had some ideas of how to do that but wasn’t confident and simply didn’t have enough hours in the week to optimize his site and pursue inbound links. We talked. He hired us to help him out and he is a very happy customer. CleanSuite is a small company that is building its reputation and success on our talents. If you go to Google.com and search for “dry cleaning software” his site is listed in 2nd spot beating out 1.3 million other pages. He was in first spot until recently. Wayne, give us a call.

In summary, yes, SEO is obvious to some people but not everyone. For companies that want to reduce their marketing risks, an SEO firm is a good bet.

2. SEO is poisoning the web.

Derek’s complaint is that Google’s search algorithm is based primary on building links back to a site. Then he goes on a rant about “SEO cockroaches” and “SEO bastards” doing all kinds of devious techniques to get links which have temporary value. He is right. If you use black hat tactics and try to trick Google you will get caught and the website will likely be tossed out. But who uses black hat techniques? Any SEO who has been in business for more than 3 years and can prove results never tries to trick Google. What we use are best practices.

1. Picking keyword phrases that will drive qualified visitors to a site – people looking for what companies are offering.
2. Optimizing a web page by adding the keywords in the right spots so that the search engine crawlers can find the phrase. This isn’t secret or hard but it has to be done correctly.
3. Building a web of reputable industry related links back to the site. Not really hard but time consuming so we can’t waste time going after useless links. No one is going to pay us for work that doesn’t produce results.

Derek, what’s wrong with using best practices?

3. The One True Way – Good Products and Good Content.

Derek’s point that many writers create “dumbed down content” is valid. It is sooooo true. I see tons of crappy content on the Internet every day. But I read fast and I can spot dumb content very quickly. Here’s the rub. I doubt that I’m the only one with a critical eye. The folks at Google aren’t stupid either. They know what good content looks like.

Thanks Derek for a stimulating article and your point of view. Ultimately, you and I can agree on something. Create good products. Create good content to let people know about it. Repeat.

Here is a link for more details: Internet Marketing Conference – Calgary 2010.

Great line-up of speakers. So far 60 people have registered. Ends on St Patrick’s Day – March 17th.

Topics include Social Media, Gaming, Videos, SEO, Pay-Per-Click and Industry related news.

Anduro is offering a discount. Call our office and we will give you the promo code.

Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.

Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.

Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:

• Enter the search term “gps”
• Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada /  All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
• Click on News headlines to see related news
• Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)

If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.

For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”.  But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.

By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.

At this stage we have a few options:

1. Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
2. Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
3. Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page

We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.

Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Jeff Nelson

Simple diagram. Great descriptions. Easy to navigate. Clear. Well put together.

Enjoy!

1. Hosting

Ideally, the IP address of the hosting server should be in the country of the target market.

For example, the hosting server of a website targeting the USA market should be located in the USA. Of course, this is not always possible but it does make a difference. I would like to say that this recommendation is critical; unfortunately it is not always possible.

2. Domain Name

The domain name should include the most important keywords that the company is targeting. This is rarely possible but it is powerful if it can be done. For example, www.antennacommunication.com is much stronger than www.antcom.com because it contains the word “antenna”. But “antcom” is shorter and that is the reason this company chose the shorter version. Of course, there are many other issues that are involved in the selection of the domain name including history, branding, trademarks/copyrights, length of the domain name, competition, and availability (price). This recommendation is not critical since the considerations listed above may take precedence.

3. Re-Directs

It is best to avoid re-directs from the domain name page to another page. For some strange reason website developers like to redirect www.company.com to www.company.com/index.html or www.company.com/home.php. In general, re-directs like this are frown upon because of issues related to the possibility of “clocking”. A worst case scenario is for a website to be banned from a search engine. The best case scenario is that the sub-page is much weaker than the real home page without the re-direct. From a user’s point of view a redirect to an internal page is awkward. It adds un necessary confusion. However, this recommendation is not critical since most search engines have figured out that the target page is the important page.

4. URL Structure and Format

Ideally, we like the URL to follow some logical format based on the URL, the folder for the website section and the file name. For small simple sites you can ignore the folder. Ideally we would add keyword phrases to the last part of the URL. For example, http://www.dell.com/business/laptops. As you can see this page is ranking well on Google.com for the keyword phrase “business laptops”. Ideally, the URLs should be decipherable as opposed to database references that are unintelligible. This recommendation is not absolutely critical. Many sites work well with the search engines without a URL format that is simple.

5. Frames

Avoid building websites in Frames. Everyone should know this by now but it is worth repeating because some developer are still using frames. For example, http://www.calgaryhotelassociation.com/. If you look at this page using www.seo-browser.com you will see that the content in the frame doesn’t show up. The frame just creates problems when search engines index the site. The search engine may index the content of the frame without the frame.

6. Flash

Flash is fine as long as it is a component (or file) on a HTML page. The search engines can’t read the content on sites that are 100% Flash (not yet, maybe in the future). Adding a page with special functionality, as we discussed, is fine. This page may not show up in the search engines very well but that may not matter for that single page. If you want the search engines to index the content of a website then this recommendation is critical.

7. Control of “Meta Tags”

With websites developed using static HTML pages this isn’t a problem. Changes and modifications are simple and quick. From and SEO point of view, the issue of manual overrides can be a serious problem when a site is developed using a Content Management Solution (CMS).

Selecting the right CMS is critical. To “optimize” the pages of a website it is critical that we need control (manual override) of the following sections on the web page:

• Title (absolutely critical)
• Description tag (absolutely critical)
• Keyword tag (search engines place no value on this tag but it is a great spot to place the keywords that we are using for that page)
• H formatting for content headings (changes should be possible with all CMS)
• Page content  (changes should be possible with all CMS)
• Anchor text related to links in the page content (absolutely critical)

8. Home Page

The home page of a website is the most important page to add keyword phrases. It is the most important page to optimize using the most important keyword phrases. See: www.paisley.com All of the keyword phrases listed on this page are working well (first or second page of results) on Google.com. This recommendation is critical.

9. Text Navigation and Site Map

Search engines need a way to find all the links to internal pages. To make this easy for search engines we recommend adding a text menu at the bottom of all pages and adding a site map with a link from the text menu or the home page. There are lots of ways that this can be done but the objective is basically the same: make it easy for search engines to find all the pages of the website. In addition we often use the site map as a good place to add links to the “Focus Pages” or optimized content pages that we create for our clients. See the links at the bottom of this page: www.novatel.com/sitemap.htm. This recommendation is critical.

10. Avoid Duplicate Content

Most search engines will only display one page if it has an option of two page with the same content. Search engines are unpredictable in how they react to two pages with exactly the same content. Google seems to pick a page whatever page it likes best – often the oldest page. Yahoo often picks the page that was updated the furthest back in time (that isn’t logical which is why it is a problem). Our recommendation is to avoid duplicate content at all costs. This includes websites with the same content on 2 URLs like .com and .ca. This recommendation is critical.

11. Robots.txt File

Every website should include a robot.txt file in the root directory of the website.

The robot.txt file tells search engines which pages NOT to index. This file also serves to give permission to search engines to index the rest of the site. Including it is a good idea because all major search engines look for this file. This recommendation is critical.

12. Form and Thank You Page

It is our experience that including a form on a website is much better than adding a link to an email address. With a form you can force the user to give you information like a phone number.

The main problem with adding an email address is that you are exposing that person to email spam. Who wants spam? We recommend adding a form and thank you page (after submission) to the Contact Us page. If we use pay-per-click ads as one of the online marketing strategies then we can add conversion tracking code to the thank you page. This recommendation is critical.

I hope these recommendations are valuable.

]]> http://anduroblog.com/2009/09/criteria-for-high-performance-websites-on-search-engines.html/feed 1 http://anduroblog.com/2009/08/results-of-deep-linking.html http://anduroblog.com/2009/08/results-of-deep-linking.html#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:57:16 +0000 matt http://anduroblog.com/?p=471 I wanted to share some results of a client for whom we used Deep Linking.  We secured a first page position on Google.ca for the term ‘H2S’ for our client United Saftety beating out over 2 million web pages.

The first email was related to an interview that CBC did with me. Dave Simms from CBC Television wanted my opinion on the Bing-Yahoo search story. The crux of the issue is whether or not the alliance will have an impact on Google search volume. My answer was No the merger will have minimal impact. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter will have more of an “impact” but realistically Google as a search medium will be with us for quite a few years. 70% of the searches worldwide go through Google. Actually, that is incorrect – my figures seem to be out of date. Market Share by NetApplication reports that Google has over 80% market share. Statcounter agrees. Wow.

We also sent out an email to announce our preview event on Wednesday, September 2 for IMC Vancouver. Avinash Kaushik from Google will be the keynote speaker. The conference will be fantastic and Anduro is helping to promote the conference by hosting an event here in Calgary a few weeks ahead of time. More about this in a future post.

Maybe we should have waited a bit before sending the second email. Today I received an email from a person I met a couple weeks ago at a business networking function wondering if it was “commonly accepted courtesy” to send a newsletter to someone without formally “opting-in”. This is an interesting question so I did some research and some thinking about what is ethical. Keep in mind that this event is explicitly a “networking function”.

One point of view by FutureQuest is that companies should have prospects opt-in if the email address is obtained from a business card. Technically this is probably correct but I’m not sure that this is practical or that it really makes a difference.

Another point of view that I like is expressed by Chip House. His post is titled: Business Card in Hand Doesn’t Mean Opt-in. Chip makes a differentiation between receiving a business card along with a handshake and receiving a card in a fishbowl. The former implies “opt-in” and the latter requires formal opt-in permission. I agree. Meeting someone, shaking their hand and getting a business card leads me to assume that I can phone the person, mail them a letter (even direct mail), fax them and send them an email – assuming that all those points of contact are on the business card.

Practically, I’m not sure how much difference it makes to get “opt-in permission”. Technically, we don’t have formal permission to send out the first email asking the person to opt-in.

My conclusion is that when I meet people at networking events I consider them business contacts who are interested in me, our company and what we are doing. I know I’m definitely interested in them and their company. So if you don’t want me to phone you or email you (tailor made or eNewsletter), then don’t give me your business card. But if you want to gain value from all the business contacts that we have in our company then we would love to have your business card and start a dialog with you.

That was in May 2005. Since then the tool has turned into a powerhouse for webmasters and SEO professionals. We now get over 15,000 visitors per month.

In Simple Mode the tool is great for browsing through a website and looking at the text and links. I can usually pick up one or two ways to improve a site just using Simple Mode.

In Advanced Mode we’ve added about 25 metrics related to the website and the page you are viewing.  In addition, there is a menu at the top with links to various tools; some that we have developed and some that are off site.

Visitors and users frequently send us questions about there site. Most often the problem is with their site but occasionally they point out a problem with the tool. A couple weeks ago, one user showed us a site using SEO-Browser that looked different in Internet Explorer and Firefox. That problem we had to fix.

Have a look at the tool: www.seo-browser.com. Try it out on your site and your competitor’s sites. You may be surprised by what you find out.

Contact me if you have questions.

Jeff Nelson
jeff.nelson@anduro.com