Google recently shook the Web design and SEO worlds when it announced it is now spidering and indexing Adobe Flash text files. Heretofore, Flash was frowned on widely in Web design world and universally in SEO. It will be interesting to see if there will now be a surge in Flash infested Web sites. I hope not.
First off, Google's new indexing will not have a major impact on SEO (see links below). But even if it did, there are even more important reasons to use Flash with care.
Flash is excellent seasoning for a Web site, but unappetizing as the main course. There are two assumptions it's very safe to make for a business Web site. First, visitors come for information, not entertainment. Second, visitors are in a hurry. If the site's home page is a clutter of animation, it will frustrate the visitor's attempt to find information and find it quickly. The best way to dazzle today's online audience is to provide easily searchable and easily digestible information.
Employing Flash to provide visitors with a multi-media experience is sensible, but even here, a company has more engaging options at its disposal, such as videocasts, screencasts, and podcasts. The time for Flash may yet come, but not today.
Meta descriptions are the page descriptions searchers see when looking at Google search engine return pages (SERPs).
They are important. Well written ones attract click-throughs. Poorly written ones, ahem, don't. Let's take a look at some examples, from a search for "auto repair chicago".
Some of these are pretty good, but Marvin's Auto Repair and Jerry's stand out, don't you think? The meta description is a customer endorsement - excellent idea. Not only are testimonials persuasive in and of themselves, but when your testimonial is the only one on the page, it's really, really going to draw attention. Yelp has hit on a very shrewd search technique using word for human readers, not search engines.
Here are a few more results -
Nothing quite as eye-popping here, but we still have a few rock solid techniques. Specific information about location and services are helpful. Sales copy, such as "the finest", may not stand out in pages full of meta descriptions making similar claims. However, I like Quality Towing and Repair's "... high quality and guaranteed," because it's more specific and because guarantees are always enticing, particularly in fields like automotive repair.
Replacing advertising fluff with relevant details about location and services draws attention. Something as simple as adding an obvious word like "guarantee" can make your site stand out from the crowd on the SERP. Quite often, companies pay scant attention to writing meta descriptions, or delegate the task completely to their Web developer. This is dangerous if the developer is unfamiliar with the industry and/or SEO. Bland, uninspiring meta descriptions just don't cut it anymore ... Getting to the top of Google is awesome, but you still need searchers to click through to your site.
By Meme Moy on February 19, 2008 7:23 AM
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It is easy to assume that search engine optimization and almost all things internet may not be right for your small business. But would that be true? How important is it for you that your potential customers find you?
According to Piper Jaffray (2007) Local search is the second most popular online activity after e-mail and even more significant is that 60% of all local business searches now happen online (33% happen in print yellow pages) and 82% of the people using local search sites follow up their research with offline action. (TMP Directional Marketing-comScore, August 2007) Using myself as an example, I don't think that I've actually found services, or goods without consulting the internet in years - from my landscaper, to my snow removal service, to babysitting and even restaurant reservations - all "local" in nature, all done online. Web sites now cater to my need to find someone reliable with customer reviews, star ratings, and verification systems that ensure that I can almost trust their listing as much as hearing it from "word of mouth."
So how does this whole thing relate to you as a small business owner?
Small businesses are often more personally invested in SEO. A 25% increase in traffic, or a 10% increase in conversions will often have a much more dramatic impact on a small business's bottom line, maybe even its survival, than it would on a multi-million dollar corporation.
What this means is that as a small business, your SEO investment may reap bigger rewards in the long run, since small steps in the right direction will enable you to reach a population of your potential customers that you were not able to reach in the past.
It's the same thing any small business would do to get started," says Matt Cutts... who writes about the ins and outs of getting noticed by Google on his mattcutts.com/blog. "You would drop fliers all over town. Online it's the same thing. Trying to get links is letting people know about you and what you're doing."
First thing that needs to be done is to assess your capacity for venturing into optimizing your web presence, versus your day to day business needs - in Internet Can Make a Big Impact on Small Business Evelyn Lee makes this point -
Once a cutting-edge option, Web sites have become a staple in the world of small businesses. Some local entrepreneurs say that having an Internet presence allows them to stay competitive, provide information and market their products and services to potential customers far and wide. At the same time, a lack of time, staff and technical skills can make it challenging for many small businesses to run Web sites.
SEO does get some negative press due to misinformation, Mark Johnson in his post Don't Waste Money on a So-Called SEO Specialist confronts American Express and their OPEN book article that suggests that SEO is a waste of money for small business owners - he has this to say to doubters-
IT ABSOLUTELY DOES WORK! If you don't believe it, do a Google search for "credit cards" and see who shows up in the natural results. Not AMEX. Not Mastercard/Visa. Not Discover Card. Not ONE of the major companies (well, Bank of America shows #9 for me). Search Engine Optimization is the great equalizer and the small business owner's friend."
In many ways it does come down to this point-- the internet is a great equalizer, sites like YouTube have proven that even nobodys can become somebodys with one home run home made video. In turn, a small business (with the right tools and know-how) has a unique chance to be seen and heard like never before to an ever-widening audience/potential market.
By Meme Moy on February 11, 2008 10:44 AM
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"Black Hat" is a term used to describe search engine optimization strategies that employ tactics that are bordering on, or are unethical. According to Wendy Boswell in Black Hat Search Engine Optimization black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:
Breaks search engine rules and regulations
Creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.
I think the search engine optimization industry has made a lot of progress in the last few years. It's a little less common to get cold calls from SEOs that guarantee #1 rankings but won't tell you how they try to do it. And if a large SEO company wants to try something high-risk with a client, they're more likely to explain the potential risks to that client first. There are still issues, of course, but I was looking over a list of 20+ blackhat SEO companies that I compiled back in 2002. The majority either went out of business or have transformed into white-hat SEO companies. For a while now, I've had a slight hunch that clients that embrace blackhat SEO on their site are willing to cut corners in other areas of business as well. Earlier today I was reviewing an email from 2001 (!) where Google removed a very large company's website from our index for hidden GIF links, machine-generated doorway pages, and cloaking. It's interesting to look back with the benefit of hindsight now. Later on, the company: - had 10+ employees convicted for inflating revenue - the CEO was sentenced to 10+ years in jail - another executive was sentenced to 2+ years in jail
Forbes had an extensive article on black hat SEO called The Saboteurs Of Search, where Andy Greenberg, described one popular tactic called "Google Bowling".
Search marketers claim they can frame certain competitors as cheaters by posting thousands of links around the Web, making a competing site look like it's engaging in "link spamming," a tactic that draws the disfavor of major search engines. In SEO circles, this technique of setting up a competitor to be punished for link spamming is sometimes called "Google bowling."
Diane Aull came up with five possible approaches, based on how one would deal with a schoolyard bully. There is no telling which approach - if any - would be successful. Her suggestions would probably work best when dealing with someone who is not targeting your site with negative SEO, but rather engaging in black hat SEO to increase his or her own site's ranking in the SERPs, thus driving yours down. You might want to consider combining several tactics for the best chance of ameliorating the problem.
First, you can ignore what is happening ...
Second, you could take up negative SEO yourself ...
Third, you could report the offender to Google ...
Fourth, you could avoid the bully ...
Fifth, you could work at becoming popular ...
There is still some controversy around what a black hat practitioner is truly capable of doing and how effective it is in destroying search rankings for targeted sites. Nevertheless, it never hurts to understand what you can of the "dark underbelly" of search, especially given the rapidly growing competitive online business environment.
By Meme Moy on January 14, 2008 6:12 AM
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Matt Cutts made a couple of thought-provoking comments in his blog regarding subdomains and subdirectories, knowledge which may come in handy as you plan your Web site taxonomy and content.
For several years Google has used something called "host crowding," which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen. This change doesn't apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain. For example, with a search query like [ibm] the user probably likes/wants to see several results from ibm.com. Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn't affect a majority of our queries... My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you're a newer webmaster or SEO, I'd recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you'll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.
Subdomains should only be used when you have enough vertical content to support a standalone Web site. Subdomains are effective because they "piggy back" on the value of the root domain, whereas if you bought a new domain, it would have no authority/age. Plus, there are some unique things you can do from a SEO perspective.
I've seen a lot of sites which had varying degrees of quality in their subdomaining strategies. If you do have subdomains, you should ideally insure that they contain primarily unique content not reflected on your other domains " each subdomain should contain page content that does not also live on other subdomains or else it can appear that you are attempting to spam the search engine indices. If you are considering how to structure your URLs and site content for natural search marketing, I'd say you might be better off just using a simple format of descriptively keyworded directories and subdirectories rather than keyworded subdomains. This is often easier to manage, and it looks a lot more natural/reasonable from the search engines perspective. Theres lower likelihood of accidentally mirroring/duplicating your content, too.
When all is said and done and you've poured what you could into your site(s), take a step back and come at it from the perspective of your target market. Redundancy or sub-par content can not only ruin your search optimization efforts, but also your reputation as an "expert" in your business/field.
By Meme Moy on December 26, 2007 6:13 AM
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It's that time of the year again, a time to take a moment, look back at the past year with fondness and welcome the new one with an open mind and renewed zeal. There is nothing quite like starting the New Year with a couple of resolutions to get you ahead this 2008. Here are some for you to think about, but remember, much like a personal resolution, yours depend on what you think your business is capable of doing, as well as what needs "improvement" in the first place.
- Get really serious about optimizing your website. "Train" yourself on the basics - maybe starting with the Best of Whoast's Blogs or hire someone to get me up to par. Small Business Computing has an article on "How to Hire a Good SEO Expert"
- Content, Content, Content -- Improve your site's content quality - cut the "fat" out and make certain that your content truly represents your business and your core capabilities while reflecting how your company addresses your customer's needs. DirectNews' article on "Substantial" content needed for SEO gives a good suggestion:
He suggested websites consider options such as encouraging user-generated content or hiring writers ... Dedicated writers producing copy for a website can be "tedious and manual" but works well for SEO, Mr Enge continued.
"Sites rich in content draw a wealth of inbound links. Great content will draw the links with little or no additional effort on your part to seek them out," he added.
- Tie your SEO efforts to your marketing plan. This should be the year that your marketing campaign intrinsically include search engine marketing not as an afterthought, but as a main component. From the beginning of your marketing plan, include SEO or SEM strategy and save time backtracking in the implementation stage.
By Brad Shorr on November 12, 2007 6:26 PM
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Speaking to a group of new bloggers the other night, I was asked about the trade off between SEO and authentic content in terms of keyword optimization. The idea that keyword phrases should be repeated often and obnoxiously for maximum search engine effect is still prevalent. In reality, search engines penalize too many keywords just as much if not more than too few.
Search engines use complex algorithms to rank Web sites. While these closely guarded algorithmic formulas vary from search engine to search engine, they are all designed to identify Web sites with the most relevant content for a given search phrase.
It's a perpetual game of cat and mouse between search engines and "black hat" search marketers. Black hats devise methods of "tricking" search engines into assigning higher rankings to a Web page, and search engines respond by adjusting their calculations to penalize it. "Keyword stuffing", as it is often called, is one such black hat technique that involves packing text and/or meta tags with a set of keywords. Once popular and effective, keyword stuffing accomplishes nothing positive today. Quality content is more than mindless repetition of keyword phrases, so that's what the search engines look for.
When in doubt, follow your instincts when writing Web and blog content. Your natural tendency will be to use relevant keywords, make them part of headlines and in bold text, and repeat them at search-engine friendly intervals. Search engines, after all, are looking for Web pages that are authentic, not ones calculated to manipulate the system. Good copywriting practices result in good SEO.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't do your homework to identify the keyword phrases your customers are likely to use. It doesn't mean you should ignore basic "white hat" SEO techniques, either. But in the end, SEO starts with great content.
By Meme Moy on September 14, 2007 12:54 PM
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There seems to be TONS of SEO tools out there that purport to help you successfully plan and implement your SEO strategy. What exactly are these tools and what are they trying to do? Here are the most common types of tools you can find and their purpose:
- Keyword suggestion tools - these tools help you analyze and gather different keywords most relevant to your business/product - for instance in SEObook's keyword suggestion tool , results of your keyword query would give the following information:
- Links the search volumes to the related global search results.
- Provides links to price estimate tools from Overture and Google AdWords. That Google AdWords tool shows the necessary bid to rank #1 for 85% of queries, and roughly how much traffic you could expect AdWords to send you based on that bid price.
- Links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker keyword research results.
- Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.
- Search engine rank checkers checks where your site ranks in a particular search engine for a specific keyword- some advance tools also have the ability to check for multiple domains and region specific databases.
- General webpage analysis tools such as the one found on webuildpages gives you your yahoo rank, pages that are indexed, backlinks to your website, .edu backlinks, domain age, and phrasecount. This information helps you check your site's SEO "report card".
- Link Checkers are quick and easy tools that help you check your site for dead links.
- Sitemap generators - According to xml-sitemaps.com, the free generator helps you do the following:
• Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.
• Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.
• Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
• Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your website.
Many many more tools are at your disposal, but a caveat before you jump into the "free tools" fray - there is still risk of viruses, so definitely do a virus check. Also, some tools are as simple as going on a website and typing a keyword, others require downloading software, be aware that since the tools are free there will be no customer support to help you through possible system problems you may have.
Keywords are the starting point of any SEO campaign, so care must be taken to assure the proper keyword usage and proper quality. Using the wrong keywords won't get you the results you want, and plastering the right keywords all over your site will not work any better. Below are readings and tools to help you maneuver your way through the sea of keywords:
Specifically for those of you with a pay-per-click(PPC) ad strategy, the post “Ultimate Guide on Dynamic Keyword insertion” Gives some tips on increasing your visibility when advertising on Google. Here is what he has to say on dynamic keyword insertion:
On most major Pay Per Click platforms, there is a little known feature called “Dynamic Keyword Insertion”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is one of those “dirty little secrets” used by PPC marketing agencies and is the cornerstone of the millions of Internet marketing eBooks written by self proclaimed “gurus”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion needs to be fully understood before it can become marginally effective and when it is, it can increase your ads click through rate (And subsequently quality score) massively.
For more on Keyword focus from search engine land’s Aaron Wall. According to Aaron, the method of placing keywords on your title/text is evolving now that search engines such as Google are changing the way they trawl for results. Simply plastering keywords all over your site is not enough anymore. In fact, it may even be detrimental to your overall ranking as Google is now moving towards being able to detect natural versus unnatural patterns in web pages. Aaron mentions a couple of ways to make sure you optimize your site’s use of keywords effectively, such as- Mix things up and change your word order and "leverage" keyword modifiers in page content.
Google has a tool that can help you come up with a variety of keywords that relate to your main keyword. Although there is no guaranty that you’ll rank better with use of this tool, it does give you more ideas of different words that your customers might use that relate to your business.
Matt Cutts recently gave a talk on “Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers” at a WordCamp 2007 conference. Who is Matt Cutts? He is the guru of all things Google; he currently heads Google’s Webspam team and has been working at Google for 7 years.
There are some important new points that he brings up in his lecture.
- Underscores (found in urls) are now going to be treated as word separators by Google. Previously, urls that you would think were keyword rich would actually be the opposite if separated by underscores – so www.americas_best_pie would only be taken by the googlebot as literally Americas_best_pie – but not anymore.
- The only way to get your blog into Google News is to have multiple authors- this being a Google News requirement for inclusion.
- Use relevant synonyms when you can in your blog – they can be as good as your more “obvious” keywords.
For more tips and comments -- Stephanie Booth provides a more detailed recap of the lecture in her blog
For the video on the talk check this post by John Pozadzides . You might be interested in reading Matt Cutt’s own comments on his talk in his blog . For those who don’t have time to disseminate the presentation or sit through an hour of the video it might be worth your time to refer to Stephan Spencer’s post on the lecture.
