We need a new SEO head in the Latitude London SEO team – It’s a Junior Role, so a great opp to learn lots and work with a great bunch of nerds. If interested  please at me on @robwatts on twitter and I’ll get back to you.  Requirements – An absolute demonstrable Passion For Search! You’ll be able to demonstrate your knowledge of search, evident through your participation and general knowledge.

You’ll be working with great brands and will get an excellent grounding in search and onlihne marketing  from a group of people who live and breath it daily, it really is a great opportunity.

I  hope to hear from you soon!

The great thing about online marketing is that it never sit stills it’s constantly evolving, constantly shifting. Today’s billy big bollox is often tommorrows has been. Sites that don’t step up are often swept away in whatever algorithmic or quality rater review so happens to contribute to their demise.

The simple thing is this – “If you want to succeed online, then you have to make a good site” it really is that simple – add value and you’ll stand the test of time, fail to do that and you’ll perish.

I wrote a strategy document for a client about 9 months or so ago. The client happened to have a site that was related to travel.  They were for all intents and purposes, a bit of a thin affiliate.  To be honest at the time, I groaned about this client, in fact I sighed deeply, as I’d been there before in a past life. I’d built many a thin affiliate site adding limited value and been a little naive to think they’d all last forever.

I guess looking back, as painful as it was to see my little spam babies die a death, it taught me an important lesson about search and marketing and what’s required to keep something alive online in 2008.

I was the archetypal technology driven code solutionist,  the challenge of ranking in SERPs was and still is in lots of ways all about creating the write kinds of signal, be they on the page on the domain or off the domain. My view or approach was by and large relatively simple. Create a domain and attack the aspects of the search engine systems that decided what sites lived and what sites died.  The methodology was simple, look at who is there in the space and do what they do, albeit better.

Of course, that’s a simplistic overview to what is a multifaced problem – companies invest thousands of pounds paying people like me to win in the SERPs. Winning in the SERPs today on the face of it, may still appear to be a  simplistic route of  change the code on page and get a few links, yet when you get under the hood you realise that of course, it’s a little more sophisticated than that.

You need a site that is technically competent, that also engages your audience, without an audience you have no base, no visitors, no sales.

Create conversations get people talking

Here’s a big secret no-one knew ;0) …online marketing today is very similar to offline marketing!

You want to create a product that people want to both buy in to, and that people will keep coming back to too. You want to have products that are recognised for the value they add to the space and that stimulate debate and conversations.You want to be known in the marketplace as a leader in that field, recognised for what you give to those who buy into you.

Advertising agencies use traditional old style media  to tap into our emotions and stimulate conversations and help us identify when we are out shopping in stores. Billboards, posters, leaflets all help re-enforce that familiarity created by that image of the  sexy female pouting or husky hunk posing to some chilled tune in an idyllic  setting using that laptop or driving that car or lounging on that new leather 3 piece suite. The idea is that we want to be those people, and that by buying those products we can. It is of course a symptom of a fucked up existence that a lot of us  feel the need to do this, but it’s how it is.  It’s the way society works, it drives consumerism and helps keep things ticking over – heck, why shouldn’t people get to live out their dreams, what’s wrong with a little artificially induced self actualisation, be anyone you want to be right? A huge topic in itself, yet like it or not, it’s a part of this conversation, people talk about things that are good or cool or interesting, people want to be associated with these and as a result will talk about them, be it over coffee, over a pint, at home, on the phone, the list could of course go on.

Online, it isn’t too dissimilar. Search engines are organisations run and administered by? Bingo, you got it – people. The old school way of SEO was simply about get your onsite code right and you’d rank. It then changed a little and required lots of links from wherever you could get them. It changed again and was reliant upon the quality and type of links, today it’s evolving further still.

Do search engines want to mirror societies needs and wishes?

Search engines have access to lots of metrics that tell them different things – toolbars,  analytics, clickthrough rates on ads, ISP data, link graphs, bounce rates etc all contribute in one shape or form to how a search engine see’s a domain.  It’s fair to conclude that a search engineer would be far more inclined to find ways to rank good content that was more difficult for SEO’s to get in and meddle with or manipulate. Only a fool would ignore the fact that search engines have accessed billions of documents and have performed numerous studies into what is a natural link graph versus what isn’t.

Whitelisting aside, you’d be a fool not to try and develop a site so that it has a natural link profile rather than one that is overtly manufactured, yet you’d be a fool if you tried to manufacture it especially when you don’t need to!

It’s not a contradictory thing, it’s simply a case of there being an effective way and a not so effective way. One way is just about links and links and links, whereas the other is about the right types of links generated in the right types of places in the right kinds of ways.

No one wants to hang in a crappy neighbourhood

If your site is shit and you really believe that you can keyword stuff or shitty productise yourself  to page one of a SERP through technology and guille alone, then you are a big nutter who is wasting not only your time, but the time of every other person who lands on your sorry arsed excuse for a site, stop, build something worthy of the people who you are trying to pull. No one likes you, you are Millwall, you may not care, but others do.

People like good haunts and will tell others

If you have a good site in a niche, then you are probably adding value to that space and are already on the road to creating a good user experience. You probably already have your social share buttons similar to those you’ll see at the bottom of this post, you might already have your facebook page, your myspace page, a Bebo page – maybe you’ve gone the micro blogging route and dipped your toe into the twitter, perhaps you have a seesmic or 12second thing going on, a youtube channel, a presence in the Google Universal search serps – maybe you podcast them and stick them on itunes…

Getting down with the masses and talking with your customers

If you haven’t then what are you waiting for? Why aren’t you out there engaging with your audience? Don’t you want them to talk about your product and what it is you do? Don’t you want to develop relationships with your consumers and have them come back to you time and time again? Do you really want to be reliant on Google and the ever escalating costs of PPC for ever and a day? No of course you don’t, you want these people to come back and tell their friends, which is why you should give them the tools to do so.

Companies like DELL have bought into social and are reaping the rewards.

Less altruistically, some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

Tools like Radian 6 are used to identfiy pinch points and conversation nodes. Opinion formers are identifed and enaged with. If a problem with a new product is identified then rather than let it grow legs and become some uncontrollable monster the social graph of the web can be quickly identified.

Companies like Google use social media in similar ways. (They aren’t just about algorithms) Matt Cutts more commonly uses his blog but also uses his Twitter account as does a colleague of his John Mueller who on occassions has reached out to users of their product, engaging with people who are having issues.

Many companies experience reputation management issues on the web, these could so often have been nipped in the bud had the companies affected had a social media plan in place. Blogs, forums, social accounts all enable for engagement with ones online user base, I’d argue that they are fundamental for any orgnisation or individual doing business on the web today.

But back to search and seo and using these signals, what do search engines get from these and why are they important?

Search Engines  Signals and Social

Very recently, Google introduced a search wiki element to it’s SERPS. Lots of people have moaned and groaned and theorised so I won’t do too much of that. The point is that people can (if they so wish) change aspects of their SERPs. Personalisation has been given one more additional option.

If people like a site, they can vote it up. If a site is voted up, it’s less susceptible to any algorithmic shifts (for that user) and will therefore (for that user) have a little more stability (for that query).  It’s reasonable to suggest that enough people from a diverse enough set of ISP, IP, OS and Geographical variances vote up a site on a given query then maybe, just maybe that Google too might see this as an additional signal of quality and do the same in its non personalised results. Ignoring the fact that it seems odd that people would vote up a site in a result before they clicked it of course, and you begin to see how quality really can make a difference.

Taking all of this a little step further, we only have to see the power of some sites and their ability to rank to begin to appreciate the value of social in an algorithmic sense.

If people are talking about you (linking) on platforms that are regulary spidered, then if the engines so chose to, these could be interpreted as a powerful set of social signals. That is, real people talking about real products that offer real value or the obverse as the case may be.   If sites are regulary cited in social spaces be it via making the front page of  social bookmarking sites like digg, or appearing in hundreds of favoutited social profiles of stumbleupon users, or via a sudden flurry of tweets from hundreds of tweeters on twitter.com then you can pretty much bet that the site being referenced has stimulated something that is discussionworthy. be that good or bad is up for the engines to determine, however the important takeaway is that it’s a safer signal of something that hasn’t been artificially manipulated by some savvy SEO,and  even if it has, then the effort required to do so, is a signal in itself that the people who decided to push it so hard, felt it relevant to the queries that the site will seek to target, and subsequently rank for.

Anyways, that’s enough – thanks to David for getting me thinking about this stuff , thanks for reading, maybe you learnt something.

I won’t be telling anyone anything new when I say that today in 2008 the web is a very different place from the web we knew in 1998. Back then Google was pretty fledgling, and spent a lot of time and energy building relationships with webmasters in the various webmaster hangouts. Back then, with a little programming nous and a lot of SEO knowledge you could easily make inroads to as many verticals as you had the time to manage or play in. It really was possible to wake up and say, “right, today I’m going to target x” and in as little as week you could be ranking for x related keywords and earning coin.

Today of course you still can, yet it’s a little bit more tricky of course. Many of the quick win doors have been closed. There aren’t as many keyword rich domains to choose from. The acquisition of links is also wrought with hurdles which must be negotiated with tact and a little cunning even. Every single aspect of web marketing today has changed and matured to a point where anyone considering embarking on an Internet start-up that doesn’t have a team with the historical background knowledge of the debates and nuances that have shaped things over the years is, well, to put it bluntly, taking a big stab in the dark.

How so

A look at the easy stuff for starters, the so called ‘on page’ factors would have you think that ‘hey, this is all easy stuff, just get the onpage implementations right and we are good to go’ . Yeah right, exactly if only that were so, yet you’d be amazed at how many web developers fall at this relatively simple 1st hurdle. It does not cease to amaze me the complete and utter lack of knowledge that exists out there on the most basic of SEO principles. You would not believe the number of people I encounter regularly who just do not get the most simplest of concepts. Page titles, keyword usage, clean URL’s, avoidance of flash, good contextual keyword rich navigation structures to name but a few. Lots and lots and lots of very talented smart people, just don’t get it. It’s almost as if the marketing of their product designed for a marketplace just wasn’t considered. It’s akin to building a boat designed to sail the ocean waves and sticking funky big holes in the hull because they happen to look cool. Net effect, the boat sinks!

It isn’t just about SEO

How many developers out there today hooked on Ruby and Ajax web 2 ideas are knocking up apps that in terms of search engine friendliness just aren’t worth squat. It’s almost like SEO and one of the biggest potential traffic generation drivers [search engines] is almost an afterthought. It’s as if some of these guys say, right we’ll build this site, tell our customers and make some money on the Internet, yet have no clue as to how it even works. Can you imagine thinking right, I’m going to buy me a car and drive it to the other side of the world and meet lots of new people on the way, packing your bags, filling the trunk, getting everything shipshape and ready only to sit in the drivers seat and realising that you can’t even drive? Not the best analogy perhaps no, yet that is exactly what company after company after company do. They employ inexperienced people who think they know what they are doing yet know nothing. They really believe that it’s just all about meta tags or keyword density and nothing else. They really don’t get the whole joined up thinking thing that connects what it is they do to a meaningful SERP position. The lucky ones learn fast and find a company that get the whole gig and hold their hands and walk them through the rights and wrongs of their websites, developing structured plans that’ll help them get to where they want to be.Those with the resources and patience required can usually get there eventually, but for the many trying to break into their niche without sufficient resource or appreciation of the time investment required, then it can really be a big problem.

Playing catchup in 2008

In a 10 places shop window there isn’t a lot of room for new kids on the block. A new player has to be able to hit all the buttons required to get them where they need to be, whilst competing with those who are out miles in front. If site x has 6000 quality web citations then site y is going to have to work pretty hard to get anywhere near them on that front.If site x has established communities of regular patrons drawn from a rich diversity of geographic areas then again, site y is going to have it’s work cut out to compete there too. In the web economy of 1998 links were relatively easy to acquire, you seldom had to pay and you could them from practically anywhere you liked. Today of course it’s a whole different story. Links need to be sourced from the right places , in the right ways and need to be of the right type to have the desired effect.

Universal search makes it all doubly harder too. With Google working hard to mitigate the effects of competitive SEO there just aren’t the spaces to go around either they are ‘ever dwindling’. Today’s search results are often outputted in ways that give the user a wide diversity of choice. A search for Mortgages might contain a mix of banks, local, informational, news, blogs, rich media and comparison type sites. This means that any expectation to come from nowhere and compete for that keyword is at best ambitious and at worst delusional. Understanding the hows and why’s of how those components of such universal results is an obvious asset.

Yet how many people truly know or even appreciate how or why this is important? How many people just shrug and think, ah that clever Google bot algo thingy all knowing all seeing just knows what to put there. Thankfully for most, the answer is lots.Knowledgeable web marketers today will attack all aspects of those SERPs and seek to influence them towards the goals of their clients. Done correctly, people won’t even notice the subtleties. Done correctly a new kid on the block struggling to compete for that unattainable organic 1st or 2nd position slot might suddenly find themselves enjoying the raft of complementary traffic that comes from a developed strategy. That youtube channel with the viral video, that carefully crafted, widely publicised press release or article, that funny viral game, that shock controversial revelation will be seen for the fantastic investment it quite clearly was.

At the end of it all I guess nothing has really changed at all, it’s all still about putting bums on seats and eyes in front of screen, yet the means to do so requires the employment of people who really get this kind of stuff and have the contacts and resources to deliver, it just really isn’t enough to employ an SEO who says I’ll get you a few links and fix your meta tags. If this is what your SEO company told you, then do yourself a favour and sack them today.

Promote my your website online

Regular readers aside, there is a chance that you may have come from a search engine for a query related to promote my website online, or get on the first page of Google or SEO for small businesses or Improve my sites position in the search engines or … I’ll stop there, point made.

Potentially the list is endless. All manner of people search for things in all manner of ways. There is no set in stone route. There are indicators and tools that people and companies working in fields like me, use daily to get a feel for a niche or domain. We look at search data provided to us by the search engines based on the competitiveness of an a PPC keyword or phrase, some of us have access to stat counter data that allows us to use data collected real time from websites that have the code installed, allowing us to see things like referral strings, user activities and clickthroughs. In other words we use information indicators from real people in real life scenarios. There is little if any guess work involved, it’s asbout real data crunching and using that knowledge to inform your strategies.

Promoting a small business online

Big businesses with big budgets have it easy. They already have the content, already have the budget that enables them to invest in people who can help them get to, and understand what it is they need to do and how it is they do it. Small businesses do not usually have access to similar resources.

Search marketing for SME’s

So how do you get started? Lets just assume you already have a website that’s been built, you might have already paid an SEO or an SEO Company to optimise your website or you might not have, whatever the case, lets just look at what might be a typical scenario.

A typical brochure type website

Your site is some old type standard 4 page website with a Flash animated intro perhaps a Home, About, Services and Contact page with a bit of static text that says not very much at all. What people don’t know is that, despite you being small, you have a massive catalog of products and stock, you have a small sales team, a customer support team, a marketing dept that deals with newspaper ads and off line directories, you have a distribution network, a product development team with an inhouse design dept too. You are small on the grand scale but in your niche you like to think you are getting to where you need to be. Your company in the area you operate is well known and respected, and your suppliers and customers all value what you do tremendously. Yet outside your little bubble nobody knows that. A little glance at your website reveals none of any of that, in the online world nobody knows because nobody told them.

Invest in your online presence and get that ROI

I hear some of you saying but hang on, I just paid $5000-00 for that website You mean Ive got to rip it all up and redo it? The answer to that is in some cases YES in some cases NO. Some websites are so awful that they are just beyond redemption. The attention they need is so drastic that they might as well start again from scratch, they need a root and branch deconstruction that addresses absolutely everything, their only redeeming feature is the email addresses that came with the domain. For others it’s not so drastic, it’s a fairly straightforward case of assessing the resources at hand and deciding what to do with them. This single blog post isn’t really the place to do justice to what is often a complex individual thing in that no two businesses are exactly the same. All have their own strengths and weaknesses that need to be assessed in the light of the company at hands aims and objectives, that said there are a few things I’d like to leave you with to consider.

7 8 general SEM tips that will help your website succeed online

• Employ a professional SEM/SEO firm or SEO ConsultantThe best way would be to employ one of the above to deliver an improvement. Forget the outlay, it really shouldn’t be a concern. A well constructed, SEO/SEM campaign can deliver a massive ROI, massive. They should be able to help you look at your business and help you with a strategy that will propel you through the roof.Don’t want to do that? Scared off by the fees? Don’t have the initial investment capital required?

  Not to worry, you can have a go at doing it yourself, at least aspects of it, but prepare to make a few mistakes and lose a $ or 2 in the process…

• Invest in a PPC program.You wouldn’t think twice about paying £500 for a onetime half page local newspaper advert, yet the same money could deliver up to 5000 laser targeted geographically related enquiries directly to your site from people in buy mode. Try this link (free £50 at the time of publication). A good PPC program will enable you to identify related keywords and phrases relative to your product or service and deliver visitors who have entered these into search engines.
  
  
• If you have a product database, put it online! If you sell things then people online will not know unless you tell them. Getting your inventory into a web based system is an absolutely crucial part of any online marketing and promotion strategy. Do it now, send me a message from here and I’ll tell you where to go, heck I might even do it for you.
• Use your staff to build you content Identify your company strengths and use the people you employ. Install software that will enable you to use your team to big up your products online, allocate company time to key individuals with something to say, get them all singing from the same hymn sheet, get their enthusiasm for your company, their jobs, your customers, your products out there.
  
  
• Interact with your customers and suppliers Install software that gives your customers genuine opportunities to feedback and interact. Show the world that your company is alive and reacting to customer issues or concerns. Allow the people who have used your products or services to talk about their experiences, if your products and services are good then with the right approach you’ll be surprised at how you can pull people in and share their views. This well help solidify relationships and improve repeat sales and increase user confidence in your company its products and services.
• Use social media to reach out to your niche The online world has an array of fora with dedicated categories and communities for all manner of interests. If a category or community doesn’t exist then consider creating one. Interact with bloggers and stumblers generate interest and get your stuff dugg build networks and friends with similar interests. Use sites like Myspace and Facebook to generate interest and Buzz, get your company or you out there in your space.
  
  
• Get relevant links to your site for the keywords you seek to attain There is no real substitute for using a bonafide link building service, a good link building service will know where to acquire the right kinds of links. They will often as part of their service, offer a content writing service too which will help your domain get the necessary links required to assist in your overall website promotion strategy. It should be said too that by following the proposals above you will naturally attract links to your site which will over time, improve your websites performance in the Search engine results pages (SERPS) ultimately lowering your PPC adspend into the bargain.
• Read blogs and content from people and companies who have a passion for this stuff Not vital, but you’d do a lot worse that to read articles and content from people who live and breath this stuff, me aside of course you might also do well to read blogs related to Online marketing ideas, Niche marketing ,Social Media , Search marketing and online sales to mention a few. Why? Simple really, doing business online is the future for many businesses today. By increasing your knowledge base you increase your ability to make informed choices that will enable you to make the best possible purchasing decisions. If you ever bought a ‘pay £10 per month for submission to a zillion search engine package’ then you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Getting back to where I started initially, if you found this article online then it might have been because you were looking for ways to promote your site. Perhaps you’d been burned in the past by some company that didn’t deliver or for reasons related to a limited budget. Heck you might even be a company just starting out looking for ideas and information. Whatever the case, I hope you found it all useful and wish you every success for 2008.

That said, it did get me thinking about the whole keywords in url thing around whether it is a good thing or a bad thing to use them.

Perhaps bad thing doesn’t really come in to it. Besides excessive use, I can’t think of any bad reason at all. I think  if anything they are good thing as they are both descriptive for humans and may also gain you a little weight in any link based algorithm that gave weight to keywords in the anchor text of a link, especially if people chose to link to you using the url only. Seen within a SERP they may also inspire a user to click through, simply via the fact that they tie the page to to the user query.

Consider this.

domain.com/keyword-keyword.htm

vs

domain.com/123456789.htm

Now, if that url is picked up by a search engine then any anchor text attribution will either be of the form 123456789 or keyword-keyword. Keyword-keyword would certainly be of more benefit especially as -’s are treated as space delimiters. (Jill does cover  this in her piece, so do go checkout what she said)

So what to do? Do we create nice juicy keyword urls in our CMS’s or do we just stick to short xyzpagename.htm conventions? I think it’s pretty clear to say that we’d be better served long term by using keywords in our URL’s, if only for the user benefits mentioned previously.

Algorithmically do keywords in a url even matter?

It’s hard to prove or disprove absolutely. I’ve tested this in the past and at the time I came to the conclusion that keywords in a url were worth doing and did give you an additional asset. Yet I can’t say with any certainty that the same applies today and forver more, simply because there are too many variables at play and you can’t ever be certain for sure around what SERPs are being weighted in which way and why. IMO different SERPs have different entry criteria, what might be easy to rank for in one space will be doubly difficult in another, simply because of how the algo has been weighted at the backend.

Search algorithms are a constantly moving target, (a little like search guidelines ) They are updated and modified to take into account both the changing nature of the Internet itself as well as the actions of SEO’s looking to exploit a flaw or two.

How would you test such a thing?

There are all manner of ways of testing things, or reverse engineering algorithms to test and see how they work. I won’t focus too much on the software that already exists out there other than to say that some programs allow you to analyse SERPs and look at things like keyword placement and densities and back link numbers and other contributing factors to overall SERP position, none of which do any kind of definitive ‘that’s the whole unifying answer to what you seek’ simply because there are too many hidden variables that we don’t have absolute access and scrutiny of. These might be the trust rank number of the page or domain that links out, the human factor of the edited SERP whereby a search engine employee has artificailly downgraded or boosted a particular page or domain.

Thankfully, for the purpose of this little test, I think there is still a way to determine whether keywords in a url have a contributory benefit.For the basis of this example, in a test of ‘do keywords  in the url have any bearing on a serp’ here is what you might want to try.

Create 2 pages of equal size and structure.

Lets say that each page has a title tag, a h1 tag a paragraph of random nonsense text with an instance of the ‘magic’ keyword. The magic keyword would be something like huggersaurus, that mythical friendly dinosaur with a penchant for squashing people with love.

Page one would would mention the keyword in the title, the Hn tag, the p tag and in the url.

Page two would would mention the keyword in the title, the Hn tag, the p tag but not within the url.

We would then link to these pages using our anchor text and see what one would be returned first in any SERP.

We would need to vary the other words with our title and Hn and paragraph tags in a way that created two different pages of equal size and keyword density. It wouldn’t really help our test if one was demoted on the basis of some dupe content penalty.

We’d also need to ensure that for the purposes of our test, we measured and monitored what page we linked to first and how.

For example, I might well create a  link_to_page_one_ here, then a link_to_page_two_here.

Any bot encountering such links *might* well take into account what link was cited first and apply a small degree of weight in any date_encountered_timestamp field. To account for this, we would run another test in tandem that reversed the positions, so that we linked to page with keywords in the url second, rather than 1st. The pages would be of equal size and structure albeit with a different keyword.We could then look at what page was returned in any SERP and draw our various conclusions. If page with keyword in URL was returned 1st, then we could say that keywords in the URL do have a slight advantage over those that do not.

If we wanted to, we could also play around a little more and link to the pages in different ways. We could see if anchor text gave a significant boost to our pages and record how variances affected the outcomes. We could for example link to the page with the single keyword or multiple keywords, or the absence of the keywords and rinse and repeat until we were happy with our results.

Lots of SEO’s do this sort of stuff, it’s a great way of learning about algo’s and weightings and how the positioning of elements can and does have an effect of the makeup of a SERP. That said, lots of SEO’s don’t bother either, simply because they already have an instinctual feel for what works and what doesn’t. They know how to get pages ranked and know the best methods for doing so. They don’t need to test such things and unless you are an anorak geek, neither should you really! It’s fun to play around with it though, dont you think?