Search Engine Marketing

No surprise that with our current economic environment, we are seeing people pull in the reigns on their personal spending.  Uncertainy is the worst position to have our economy in, people are not sure if it is okay to spend or should they prepare for the worst for a more severe recession.  It will be interesting to see the online shopping numbers for this holiday season.  I believe there will be growth in those numbers but it will be much a smaller increase than we have seen in recent years.

News:

New research from comScore Inc. shows traffic at travel-related Web sites is plummeting as the economy worsens.

The company, which tracks Web traffic of all kinds, found travel service sites registered a 14 percent decline in October hits compared with last year. Overall, Web traffic at online travel portals was down to 38.2 million hits for the month.

(more…)

First off we want to thank the SEOMoz staff for hosting such an informative and high-level event.  The event covered the following topics on Search Engine Marketing & Optimization:

SEM/SEO Topics:

• Thinking LIke a Search Engine
• Elite Site Architecture
• White Hat Cloaking
• Spam Detection
• SEO Legal Issues
• Site Reviews
• Global Search
• Sitemaps
• Crawlability
• Reputation Management
• Social Networks for SEO
• Link Buying
• Enterprise Link Building
• Vertical Search Inclusion
• Future of Search Engines w/ Danny Sullivan
• Expert Q&A

It was very informative and compared to other SEO conferences I actually learned some fresh new information that will be implemented into our process.

Photos:

We have uploaded the pictures we took from the 2-day SEO event.  Please look to the left on our sidebar and click on our “Flickr Photos” links to see them.  Enjoy.

It looks like this chapter is still not over.   Today I read that Legg Mason Capital Mgmnt has back Jerry Yang and the current board of directors.  This rejects Carl Ichan’s arguement that the board of directors botched the Microsoft merger talks.

Its my personal opinion that they should stay independent of Microsoft’s Live search if they are acquired either way.  Obviously some technology sharing is needed to help improve both search engines results (Live more that Yahoo).  To the public they should stay separate.   We need more choices that less in the search engine industry.

Hopefully Yahoo! in its current form can resist the massive pressure that is being put on the company and stockholders for major change that will go with its acquisition talks.

Here is a link for news on the current situation

This article was emailed to me this morning and it was a very interesting read. It talks about Microsoft using fake search spiders to generate hits on a website analytics referrer log. I would usually stay clear of rumors like this but in this case I have seen a bunch of traffic on one of my other websites from Live Search.

When I go to check the listing the supposed traffic came from I can’t seem to find the domain anywhere. This has been happening about atleast 6 months that I have noticed.  Here is some of the post on encodable.com.

“As this log snippet from VisitorLog shows, I get about 30 separate hits per day from hosts named livebot-65-55-*-*.search.live.com.  The vast majority of them are bots, not real humans, as evidenced by the fact that they have no screen resolution (and therefore no screen), which while not a guarantee of botness, is a pretty strong sign of it, especially when combined with other bot-like characteristics such as having “livebot” in the hostname.

So far this is all OK.  However, the bot’s USER_AGENT string is set to IE7/Win2003, which is bogus [the full string is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)].  It’s clearly a bot, and possibly a spider, so it’s not a real IE7 browser; it should identify itself with an accurate user-agent string like a responsible internet citizen.”

Click Here to Read the Full Post

Well the has finally come. Flash is now SEO-friendly according to Google’s Webmaster Central blog. First off, I do not recommend anyone go out and design their new website in 100% flash and then expect to do as well or better than and text based website.

Internally at Infoscour we will be creating a flash website to rank for some search terms that are mildly competitive to see what we “can” and “cannot” do. We still believe that unless you have a Fortune 1000 brand, it will be increasingly hard to outrank websites that do major content production through website development or blogging.

With that out of the way lets look at some of the Q&A that the Google engineers put out on what this actually means and what limitations are still in place:

From the Webmaster Central Blog:

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
A:  We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
A:  All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
A:  At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google “see” the contents of a Flash file?
A:  We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
A: Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?
A; There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

In closing I feel this is a BIG announcement but without testing to see “how” indexable a flash site is and “how” well it performs compared to other websites, before I make a claim sayings “it’s okay and the water is warm” on flash.  We will be writing a follow-up article on this in the future after we gather some data on our tests.

Source: Google on Indexing Flash

This afternoon I am watching a video on SEOmoz and reading a post on Shoemoney.com about the ramifications of giving away tactics that work effectively on gaining higher placement in the search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

I posted a comment on SEOmoz so I will follow up on that.  In my opinion if you are a search engine marketing and you “out” a tactic that you are using for a client and it gets “fixed” by Google and harms their rankings then you are a fool and your client should fire on the spot.

Personally I only give away valuable information like this in a 1on1 situation with someone that I know and trust.  This is a billion dollar industry so you have a market that will try anything to get on top of the rankings so if someone posts a tip that actually works, people are going to not only copy it over and over again for their vertical they will also pass it too all their buddies as well or even blog about it.  At that point Matt Cutts or one of his minions will read it and he will whip out is “Easy Spam Block” button and kill it like Ludacris at Summer Jam.

I already mentioned a cool trick for a social media website at the SMX Advanced after party and I had emails in my inbox the next morning asking me to email instructions on how to reproduce it.  It dawned on me that maybe I should STFU as well.   I am going to sit down with my buddy and explain it too him but it will not be written down and I will ask him to use it for his personally projects only and not never discuss it period.

In this type of environment there is way too much upside for keeping your mouth shut and only sharing with trusted friend then too openly talk or blog about tricks and tactics that work currently.  I know some will say “well, if you so good then it shouldn’t matter”.  Well my answer is “I like to work smarter not harder”.

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Dal

Here is a question I am frequently asked when new clients call up and are interested in obtaining SEO service for their website. But why is it important and it is right for everyone. After six interesting years of doing this I have to say “yes it is”.

Let me explain why

First I will give some background into the search engine industry and why they have been around since 1995 and now (2002-present) it matters. Many of might remember your first experience searching Yahoo in 1997. I remember many non-relevant searches coming up like if you searched “Brittany Spears” you might get some pr0n website or whatever was the flavor of the day.

Why would this happen?

First, our not-to-be named spammer knew that Ms. Spear was very popular as this moment so they knew that many people were searching “Brittany Spears” in Yahoo! on a daily basis. With this fact they knew a top 10 placement in Yahoo!’s search index would drive significant organic traffic to their website. Second, the algorithm they used at the time was not very intelligent so it was easy to exploit. This was the early days of SEO and it was pretty basic. A little meta tag spamming and some hidden/cloaked text and “poof!” you were magically transported to the top of the search index. (You wonder why our industry has had such a harder time to establish itself).

What happened next?

Two friends and a little company called Google got its feet off the ground. They made is very interesting conclusion. If you weighted website by the other websites that links you. But not quite that democratic, all links (votes) are not created equal. The more weight your website holds then the more weight your link (vote) carries as well. Well folks, this was a game changing event and actually made the Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization industry into what it is today.

Why was this so important?

Well before this advancement you were more likely than not to get non-relevant results when you searched more generic or popular topics. Well this would really tick off the average web surfer. I would even propose that they would even look for alternative search engines until they would find one that would not get such un-relevant search queries. Google gave them this option they were looking for and has helped them gather over 60% of the entire search market.

Was it just Google or did something else happen?

Yes something else happened at the same time and I will take a moment to cover this. Human nature has always revolved around being a “hunter gatherer”. We go to work everyday to “seek” out money to take care of our families. We go to the grocery store to “seek” out the food and we constantly “seek” out information to better our position or educate ourselves. So I would propose that humans had it in them to be “natural” searchers at heart being that is part of our nature throughout history. You might be asking yourself “that is great but how is that relevant too my web marketing”? Let me bring in the other item that happened before I bring us full circle. Second is broadband penetration, this is important and I would say was a major reason of why Web 1.0 never reached its potential. There was a general lack of computers and high speed internet in the average American home. We have now passed that 50% penetration point and most workplaces also have some form of high speed internet access. If we look at the internet itself and the speed that most web services run at we have nearly light-speed access to a plethora of information online (if you know how and where too look). I believe this development has not even begun to really show how it is going to affect society in general being that the internet is still in the early stages of its development. Giving people this type of access, speed and now useful tools to find information is unprecedented in human history. We can see that limited access to information was an effective tactic used to control people so giving this access to anyone should free people over time.

Okay, why is this important?

It is important because this is the last frontier where it is like the wild west online. Many businesses we talk too daily either has never heard or SEO, don’t understand the importance or had a bad experience and are taking that as a reason why SEO is not for them. Well guess what, SEO is fundamentally important and should be the cornerstone too any marketing strategy.  It is still a level playing field with an experienced search engine marketer.  You can have your brand along side the largest brands on the planet.  Unlike PPC (Pay Per Click) or any other advertising medium it is and will always be “pay to play”.   With the search engines making their money from users clicks on the ads that appear along side with the non-paid search results.  They are never (I mean never) going to let people buy there way into these results because they have built trust with the users and if it came to light that Google ever let people buy their way into the index then people will flood to the next search engine that did not practice this type of revenue generating activity and if everyone does this then I personally will be launching a search engine to bring this back to the people.  It is that important and fundamental.

Full Circle (Summary of SEO Importance)

Okay now we have most of the important elements accounted for so we can go into why SEO is important for “any” website or business.

1. People search for things everyday so having your website placed high in any search engine for the generic keywords that relate closely to your core business function

2. This is natural traffic that will come daily depending on the popularity of the keyword or phrase

3. You competitors are doing it or will be shortly once someone explains this too them

4. You have the most level “playing field” you are going to get as a small or medium business owner

5. You can appear along side fortune 500 companies and this enhances your brand

6. Search is only going to grow as more people come online and learn about different methods to finding information or services

7. Search is the ultimate time saver (People love convenience)

8. People assume you can find the best deals online

-Dal