Blogs and SEO

I am a big fan of the Long Tail, the term coined by Chris Anderson, Executive Editor of Wired Magazine to refer to what happens in economics when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.

In this article I found it quite interesting that UIE applied the concept of the Long Tail to prioritizing where you spend the bulk of your time on design and usability. Sure, there are a few pages that get a large chunk of traffic, such as the home page, but that doesn’t mean that that is where you should spend most of your design time. Instead look at the buckets of pages that add up to a large chunk of your traffic. For example, if all of the articles on your site add up to a large amount of your traffic, then you should spend a reasonable amount of your time in your redesign focusing on the articles template.

I think this same argument applies to search engine optimization (SEO) as well as to design. If your product pages account for 50% of your traffic, half of your SEO time should be spent on the product pages (rather than your articles, FAQs, etc.).

Spend your time on the tail!

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I’m usually of the mind that home pages should be rich with textual content so the search engines have something to sink their teeth into. In most cases it’s your home page that gets the most weight of all the pages of your site, so you don’t want to squander that opportunity. However, there are (rare) exceptions to this — times when another approach is in order — where you strip away all but the most essential components (sometimes all the way down to just a search box).

This is referred to in some circles as “home page Googlization.” Usability guru Jared Spool recently blogged about home page Googlization. I pretty much agree with his take on this subject. However, we felt that the homepage of our client TrustCite was an exception that warranted Googlizing. The design is very minimalistic. Have a look at it. For this site, simplicity and responsiveness was of primary importance, because the site is meant to become a frequently used resource for New Zealanders. Its singular purpose is to help Kiwis find reputable tradespeople and service providers by relying on feedback from the user’s social network. The primary method of locating these suppliers is through the search box, although there are strong trigger words on the page tucked away under the “Browse categories [+]” link.

Other examples of sites where I think home page Googlization would be in order:

• Wikipedia (rarely are any of the trivia featured on the home page of interest to me, and never has this filler content been what I went to Wikipedia for)
• most bank homepages (all I care about as a customer is the online banking login form… take me to my money!)

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Just read this awesome post from Chris Smith of Verizon Directories (SuperPages.com), where he lays out his criteria for selecting an SEO firm to work with. In summary (I’m paraphrasing here), the SEO agency…:

• should have longevity and track record of at least somewhat related work
• should not have promoted itself using unrealistic promises and representations
• should have a clean record (no black-hat methods)
• should not have tried to impress with a cursory 5-minute site assessment leading to naive recommendations
• should not have insulted our technical work
• should not have made claims of secret methods/knowledge
• should have priced their services reasonably
• should have posted information on their website about the companies/sites they’ve done work for
• should have demonstrated strong technical work on their own site as well as clients’ sites
• should have good people and make that evident on their company site
• should have projected a professional demeanor
• shouldn’t have pestered or been hard-selling
• should be flexible in legal contract negotiations, once selected

Good stuff! Read Chris’ full article: “How major companies choose SEOs”.

(Disclaimer: yes, Verizon SuperPages.com is a client of ours, and no we don’t wear sandals to business meetings.)

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DMNews.com has relaunched with a new design and a new back-end, both done by us at Netconcepts. On their blog, DM News’ founder and publisher Adrian Courtenay talks about the relaunch and gives us such glowing praise that I feel myself blushing!

A few new features worth noting:

• The entire archives have been opened up. No more passwords required!
• Articles support both comments and trackbacks.
• Deep links to old articles have been maintained through 301 redirects.
• The site now offers RSS feeds. Not just one main RSS feed, but every category has an RSS feed.

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CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offers many more benefits beyond that of streamlined web pages with table-less layouts and precise positioning (no more transparent 1-pixel spacer GIFs!), mentioned in my previous post. Indeed, that’s just scratching the surface of CSS.

Here are some more clever things you can do with CSS to get your website really humming:

• Reorder your content to sit above your top and left navigation in the HTML. That will boost the keyword prominence on your pages, which is good for SEO. Then use CSS to get the page to still display as you want. CSS Zen Garden is a great example of this in action… for example, notice how the HTML doesn’t change between this layout with left-side nav and this one with right-side nav; it’s only the CSS that’s changing.
• If you must use graphical navigation or headings instead of text-based, then use the CSS “image replacement” technique to substitute in a text link or heading tag, respectively, when the CSS is not loaded (as is the case when the search engine spiders come to visit). For example, northland.edu uses this technique well. Currently, this is much more effective for SEO than Alt attributes.

  Many of the image replacement techniques physically move the text off the screen (text-indent: -9999em; left:-9999em;display:none, etc). This isn’t desirable as search engines are starting to examine external CSS files more closely to look for spam. There are a few image replacement techniques that don’t do this type of hiding and are still accessible, namely The Leahy/Langridge Method, The Gilder/Levin Method and The “Shea Enhancement”. Each of these methods have their pluses and minuses, which the Mezzoblue article outlines quite well. (Thanks to our CSS guru Darren for this last bit of advice.)

• Learn to code in “CSS shorthand.” With shorthand, hex codes for colors, margins, box dimensions and borders can all be abbreviated, for instance. More about this here. The efficiency of CSS shorthand translates into not only a speedier download for your customers, but also compact and tidy code that’s easier to maintain.
• Make code that “degrades gracefully” (or, as they prefer to say now in geek circles, “enhances progressively”). Creating a separate “low-bandwidth version” or “printer friendly version” or “mobile version” of your site will sound ludicrous in years to come (heck, I think it sounds ludicrous NOW!), because CSS makes such a thing unnecessary. Check out how gracefully gotomedia.com degrades on a cell phone or PDA, for instance.
• Correct for browser incompatibility snafus with browser-specific CSS. Does something look awry in your page layout when loading your site with the Safari browser, for instance? Internet Explorer doesn’t always play nice with the other browsers. Until the days where all the browsers follow all the same standards to the letter, browser-specific stylesheets are a useful crutch.
• Separate the presentation layer from the content layer as much as possible and move it into an external stylesheet (in other words, a separate .CSS file). That way it gets cached by the web browser and doesn’t have to reload with each new page.
• Plan for site-wide changes. Things change — colors, sidebars, ads, copyright dates, etc. Utilize CSS files and/or server-side includes to make future site-wide updates as painless as possible.
• Make use of the cascading nature of CSS. Most of the styles you define will be used site-wide. Some will only be for one particular page. Then there will be occasions where you’ll want to “cascade” styles, and have certain sections of your site adopt a particular look/layout/theme that overrides or branches off from the site-wide styles. Clever use of cascading styles can lead to very efficient and elegant code.

  Warning! Geek speek ahead:

Be careful of overriding previously declared statements. And also be aware that specificity is important in the cascade. Declare all your tag styles first then declare your id and class selectors down the doc. That way the cascade works and can be overwritten with new selectors. (Thanks again to our CSS guru Darren for this last bit of advice.)

CSS coders: the Web Developer Firefox extension is an awesome tool for coding, debugging, and tweaking style sheets. You can display the stylesheet and the rendered page simultaneously side-by-side and then interactively edit the CSS, immediately viewing the effect of the change on the rendered page. And it makes identifying errors (be they validation, CSS, or JavaScript) a piece-of-cake. Did I mention the plugin is free?

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What’s the best way to get listed in the Open Directory (aka DMOZ)? I often hear people complain that they can’t get their site listed. They wait for months and nothing happens. Then they resubmit and wait, and again nothing happens. Then you throw your hands up in the air, wondering if bribes or secret handshakes are required.

An Open Directory listing is a useful thing to have. With it comes some good link gain ?Į from Google Directory, DMOZ.org, and a pile of lower-tier directories that use the DMOZ database. It’s not a magic bullet by any means, but it’s worth getting listed.

The key to getting into DMOZ seems to be in picking the right category. The actual mechanics of submitting is easy. From the chosen category page on DMOZ.org, simply click on “suggest URL” (or “Submit a Site” from the category page in Google Directory). I’m going to mix metaphors here (English majors please forgive me)… if you want to give yourself the best shot and to put your best foot forward, heed these words of advice:

1. Peruse the categories where your competitors are listed.
   Often times you’ll find multiple suitable categories this way. You can search either DMOZ.org or Google Directory. Try searching for their domain name, and if that turns up nothing, try their company name / website name, and variations thereof.

2. Read the category information to ensure that category is appropriate for you
   When viewing the category page within DMOZ.org, click on the “Description?Ĺ link at the top right of the page. Make sure your submission will be totally on-topic and fall within the guidelines listed here.

3. Try to pick a category with an editor.
   This is important. You don’t stand much of a chance if there’s no editor. That’s because your submission will go to a higher-level category editor who is probably overwhelmed with submissions coming in from all the unmanned subcategories underneath him/her. You can see if a category has an editor by scrolling to the bottom of the category page at DMOZ.org. If the category has one or more editors, their name(s) will be listed at the bottom of the page preceded by the words “Category editor.” For example, the Computers: Internet: Web Design and Development: Promotion category is edited by cmconsulting. Clicking on cmconsulting takes you to her profile page, which in this case includes a link to her company website.

   To find relevant categories with editors, try this search on Google:

   site:dmoz.org intitle:keyword “Category editor” OR “Category editors”

   replacing the word “keyword” above with your main keyword. So, for example, if you’re looking for jewelry-related categories with editors:

   site:dmoz.org intitle:jewelry “Category editor” OR “Category editors”

4. Fine-tune your home page to fit the category you are targeting
   For example, if you are a jeweler with a range of inventory and you are submitting under the Shopping: Jewelry: Charms category, make sure Charms is a primary feature on the home page (in the title tag and in the page content), at least until you get approved.

5. Spiff up your site prior to submitting
   Scan your site for broken links and broken images with a broken link spider tool and fix them. Remove any “This page under construction” messages. Spell check all the copy for typos. Ensure that you’re providing your full contact information, including address. Remove anything dodgy like doorway pages or tiny text (and NO, don’t put them back after you get in!). Make sure the content of your site is valuable. Thin affiliates aren’t welcome in the Open Directory.

6. Consider going Regional
   You might consider it more desirable to be listed on a main global category page, but we need to be pragmatic here. If you are a retail shop in Dallas, Texas, you stand a much better chance of getting into DMOZ if you found a Regional category for Dallas, Texas. If you have multiple locations, consider a broader Regional category that encompasses all your locations. For example, if you have locations in Dallas and Houston, go with Texas. If you have locations in Dallas and Vancouver, go with North America. Sometimes, multiple Regional categories would be more appropriate.

7. Get your home page listed first before trying to get “deep links”
   For typical sites, DMOZ strongly prefers listing only the home page. Exceptions are made where a sub-section or sub-page adds substantial value to the category and wouldn’t be located easily by visitors to the home page. Examples of such: an article library, a video archive, conference proceedings. If you have such a resource, submit it and see if you can get in — but do it after you’ve successfully gotten your home page listed. And submit the resource to a DIFFERENT category. Quite a number of sites have achieved multiple listings in DMOZ. Hopefully you will too!

8. Be non-promotional when crafting your title and description
   You will need to work in your most important keywords into the title and description (the title is most important), writing in the third-person, and without sounding salesy. And this title needs to look like the name of your site, not a list of keywords. This will reduce the risk that you’ll turn off the editor and the risk that the editor will change the title and description. DMOZ information is sometimes displayed in SERPs ?Į like when the search term used isn’t present in your page content or your meta description. If an editor rewrites your title or description for you, your most important keywords may be stripped out or your site could be introduced in an unappealing way on Google SERPs.

9. Be patient, but not too patient
   Don’t expect your listing to be approved in a week. But then again, don’t wait a year. If after a month or two you don?Ĵt get in, submit to another category. Don’t waste your time submitting to the same category; you’ll just sit in the queue with multiple copies of your submission and that’s not going to make the editor happy.

10. If it’s a second submission, lower your sights
    Ok, so your listing didn’t get approved and it’s been a month or so. Well then, this time pick a category that’s more attainable for you. For example, maybe you should submit to a more specialized category (e.g. Shopping: Jewelry: Handcrafted, instead of Shopping: Jewelry). Or pick a Regional category.

11. Once you’re in, request a category reassignment
    Didn’t get in to your first choice category because it didn’t have an editor or you didn’t get a response from your submission? Then I’ve got good news for you: it’s a lot easier to move categories once you’re in Open Directory than it was to get in in the first place. You don’t need to settle for a listing in a sub-optimal category.

12. Get more involved in the ODP (Open Directory Project) community
    This could mean volunteering to become a category editor. Or just becoming known as a constructive, helpful person on the Resource Zone forums. Insiders have a better lay of the land. They know the politics, the manoeuvering required, the favors to call in, the buttons to press.

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If you read Marketing Profs, you may have seen my two-part article over the last couple of weeks Ten Tips to Help Your Blog Soar in the Search Engines.

The tips involved…

1. Specific customizing of your title tags
2. Ways to clean up your URL structure and aggregate link gain to a single definitive (canonical) URL (i.e. reduce duplicate page issues)
3. Adding a tag cloud and tag pages to your blog and then optimizing those tag pages
4. Offering text links to related posts
5. Adding a Top 10 Posts list to your home page with text links to those posts that you most want to pass link gain to
6. Improving your anchor text on permalinks and on external links to other content of yours
7. Adding intro copy rich with keywords to the top of the page through the use of sticky posts
8. Use of heading tags
9. Use of bold or emphasis tags in the body copy of your blog posts
10. (For blogs with multiple authors) Creating an author page for each contributor and linking to their site directly from your home page to pass them link gain using keyword rich anchor text.

The complete article is around 3000 words and goes into much more detail. It includes suggested WordPress plugins to use and even sometimes specific PHP code to insert into your blog.

If you are not a MarketingProfs premium subsciber you won’t be able to read the article, so either sign up, or most of the information from the article is available on my blog optimization tag page.

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The problem with embedding a tracking code into URLs to track referrals from particular marketing campaigns or from particular partners is that inevitably those URLs end up in other places, such as in the search engines. Thus your referral numbers become overinflated.

Case in point: Google’s “Inside AdSense” Blog. A couple days ago I searched Google for [inside adsense] and was surprised to find that the #1 result was not http://adsense.blogspot.com. It was the URL with a utm_source and some other stuff appended at the end of the URL (i.e. the URL was something like http://adsense.blogspot.com/? utm_source=aso&utm_campaign=ww-en_US-et-asfe&medium=et). Unfortunately I didn’t record the exact URL at the time, and today Google is back to returning what it should be returning for the top result: http://adsense.blogspot.com (without any utm_source or query string). I bet the Analytics folks at Google will be scratching their heads at the spike in popularity of the “ASO” (or whatever it was) referral source when they look back at the month of May (unless of course they’ve read this blog post!).

Example #2: CBS News. Check this out… Run the query [site:www.cbsnews.com inurl:source=rss] on Google. Google returns 27,900 pages. You’ll see that all of those pages have a source=RSS in the URL. Even though I don’t believe Google’s numbers of results to be even remotely accurate, still there are a heck of a lot of pages there, and those pages are bringing in some amount of traffic from Google searchers. When they do, the referral source is being wrongly attributed to the site’s RSS feed. I wonder if CBS News realize this? Probably not.

So, if you must use the URL’s query string to track your referral sources, then at least make sure that you aren’t ever serving those links to search engine spiders. Drop the referral source from all links when spiders come to visit. Don’t worry; the search engines say this sort of “cloaking” is totally okay.

That will ensure your own site isn’t providing source coded links for the spiders to explore. But what to do about other sites that are linking to you? I suggest that you 301 redirect all traffic to URLs with tracking codes to the corresponding URL without the tracking code. You should see that your source coded pages in the search engines’ indices should drop away to nothing over time (or at least get relegated to “supplemental hell”).

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Understanding your competitors — their strategy, their tactics, their level of success, etc. — is crucial to the success of your SEO initiatives. I’m not just talking about your traditional competitors, I’m referring to the other sites occupying spots in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for keywords that you are targeting.

Many free competitive analysis tools are out there, but you have to know where to look for them. One of my favorite SEO blogs (Stuntdubl) offers a veritable Home Depot of such tools, at Mr. Ploppy’s Monday Tool List.

It’s a bit like walking into a DIY store and being faced with an overwhelming array of options. What is the right tool for the job?

Here’s a sampling of some of the SEO tools that I use for competitive analysis and what I specifically use them for:

• URL Checker, Product Page Checker — to check saturation (# of pages indexed)
• PageRank Lookup, PageRank Search, Webmaster Eyes, SEO-Links — to run bulk checks of PageRank scores, to analyze PageRank flow
• Neat-o — to review anchor text of inbound links
• Link Checker, Yahoo Site Explorer — to check link popularity and review inbound links
• Alexa — to check Alexa Rank and review traffic trends on someone’s site
• What’s That Site Running — to determine what server software a site is running
• Check Server Headers — to see what type of redirect (301 or 302) is being used; to see if a 404 is being served when it’s supposed to be, etc.
• Keyword Ranking Tool — to track positions in the SERPs

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You’ve probably heard it before, that the vast majority of the jobs that our children will hold when they grow up haven’t been invented yet. But what you may not have heard yet are some example future job functions being postulated.

According to the Office of the Future: 2020 report, these new roles will include:

• Virtual Meetings Organizer
  who will help employees schedule conferences and set up the required cameras, projection systems, electronic whiteboards, meeting software, audio equipment and related tools
• Contract Resource Coordinator
  who will bring together the right contract workers for a given project, like a movie producer assembling a cast, camera crew and production team
• Information Integrator/Abstractor
  who will collect, compile, and index text, data and images so this content can be searched in a variety of ways

It was this last role that most intrigued me, since I am a search geek after all! I just imagine a scene from The Minority Report where the Information Integrator waves his/her hands in the air purposefully and talks to a computer while within a virtual world of information projected onto the back of his/her retinas. In this world he/she categorizes schemas for datasets, slices and dices incoming datastreams into more manageable segments, gives directions to an AI to do further categorization on its own, and so on.

As a business blogger, I also got to thinking that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the “Information Integrator/Abstractor” of the future.

Think about this, what does a business blogger do but the following:

• identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
• take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
• ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
• cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
• republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world

Sounds like a plausible job description for an Information Integrator/Abstractor of the Year 2020!

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