Strongwords SEO Blog

From the search engine that first brought you millions of search results in under a second comes instant results – that is, results that dynamically change as you type. This is closer to the ideal of search that many of us have in mind… I mean that we will never need to search for any information as it will all be right in our minds.

That and other ideals (e.g. the Star Trek scenario of being able to yell out to a ‘Computer!’ that just waits for us to address it) are all still a ways away. Still, it’s an exciting step forward.

Matt Cutts, meanwhile, was quick to add that SEOs will still have jobs (presumably assuring himself simultaneously that there will always be a need for a Google spam cop).

Every once in a while I get an email from a complete stranger somewhere in Canada who writes to critique, correct or otherwise comment on my list of the top 100 Canadian songs of all time. While this search phrase is not horribly competitive, I still find it fun to get feedback on such a larky web page. When I put it up I made sure to mind all my SEO p’s and q’s and then I interacted with one of the most popular blogs in the country and created an idea that probably ranks as the most “viral” thing I’ve ever done online. (I’m not really a viral kind of guy.)

In any case, it’s fun to see that that page still ranks well and to see that canoe.ca or anyone else has not even thought of trying to come up with their own list. I get an email about once a month, on average. In some cases these are quite interesting. One of the most recent ones I got was from Sammy Kohn, drummer for the Watchmen, who wrote to lament that they were not included originally, which I admitted required correction. I just got another email from someone in Tampa Bay, in fact.

It’s a case in point that creating a unique web page and doing it properly can have rewards over many years. When you appear at or near the top of Google results, people believe you are authoritative… apparently whether you are or not. All this from simply throwing up a page that was simply optimized properly, even if it was highly self indulgent (and remains so).

Anyway, for anyone who wants to comment on the list (which I just updated) in the future, please comment below.

Cheers!

I just posted a new static page about some recent successful SEO and Internet marketing.  I don’t have much time to update this site nor do I care to, as I have plenty of work to do right now.

I should admit that not everything I work on has been a great success. In almost all cases where things have not worked out as well or have had middling results, there is a shortage of commitment from companies.

I can do some SEO that will keep your company afloat but you need to help me out. You need to update the design of your site, for example, especially as more pages are added and your site’s design falls farther behind the times and changes to search engine algorithms.

That being said, I am still pleased to be well ahead of the curve in some cases and doing stuff that still works, in other cases.

I should blog more – but I am just overbooked.

Google Caffeine was first previewed in August 2009 and will go live soon.

Any change to Google’s algorithm is of course big news, spawning reams of Internet chatter, a whole lot of speculation and probably some fear-mongering, along with some brand new websites (e.g. Compare Caffeine!)

What exactly Google Caffeine will do, though, is largely unknown even though some have reported that it will be a change to Google’s indexing methods and Matt Cutts (and webmasters who tried the beta version) note that there will be changes to rankings. One thing that will not change will be the look and feel of Google.

A big change noted by many (of us) who previewed Google Caffeine was the speed of results – it’s about twice as fast, if you can believe that.

Matt Cutts summarizes on his blog:

The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change.

While Google has very kindly (mercifully, for those who will inevitably move down) held off until after the Christmas season, that is largely because of flack they have received in the past. It does not seem to be because Caffeine will have as profound an effect on search results as have major updates of the past.

Lilengine.com provides a good overview of changes it found in a comparison of Caffeine to “Old Google” (i.e. the one we’re using today). Some changes they identified are as follows:

* Google Sitelinks disappearing from some results.
* Rich Snippets disappearing from some results.
* Caffeine has difficulties handling 301’s. ( This is a bug )
* Page 1 results mostly contain the same sites, however positioning is quiet different
* Page 3 and onwards seem generate completely different results.
* The index page on root domain now has more weight.
* Pages with heavy keyword stuffing are been penalised.
* Pagerank Sculpting is no longer effective. ( further confirming the rel=nofollow topic )
* Brand name / Domain trust further effecting SERP. ( a step further in the Google Vince Update? )
* Number of inbound links from external domains
* External links using targeted keywords as anchors carry more weight.

The last four points are nothing new by the way. It seems to me, then, that Caffeine will simply entail that SEOs continue to explore the long tail of relevant content, staying away from suicidal blackhat practices like keyword stuffing and over optimization and continuing to acquire legitimate organic links. So once again, Caffeine seems like no big news for SEO, although it might be relatively big news in Search.

What Caffeine actually looks like and how it will actually affect all us webmasters will, of course, have to wait to be seen. I suspect it will affect legitimate sites very little and it will only give webmasters and SEOs more work to do. In any case, we will all find out for sure, come 2010.

To learn more, see:
http://www.readwriteweb.com
http://blog.360i.com/
http://www.computerweekly.com

The last few weeks have seen a small flurry of news in search.

Google Caffeine
The buzz is that this is the biggest change to Google’s algorithm since late 2003 (aka the Florida update/dance). It has been in beta for some time and is going live right now. I didn’t like the beta version (now retired) because it was only available for google.com.

Social Search
Google rolled out social search, which integrates your results with listings from friends in your various social networks. It’s been met with some criticism and it even gives some people the creeps. But expect Google to keep tweaking things. Maybe it’ll be a good Google product in the end; maybe it’ll be useless to most of us.

There is smaller news of course, such as the way Google’s local business results have really taken off in the past few months, squeezing publishers of directories and other local marketing and inciting SEOs to get pissed off about Google hogging search results. Twitter’s real time search was old news from late in 2008 but Twitter has continued to improve its search and overall functionality. Most importantly, Twitter is an undeniable Force-to-be-Reckoned-With when anyone discusses Internet marketing (if not SEO) today. Finally, also, Google dropped PageRank in Webmaster Tools, possibly in favor of Trustrank, one might wonder.

For all that, there is very little news in mainstream search engine optimization (SEO), as should perhaps be expected at this point in the game. A list of top 50 SEO tips from this week’s pubcon confirms it: not much new in the world of actual day-to-day SEO. That may bode poorly for professional SEOs, only because people may think that all they need to do is pick up an SEO starter guide from Google or an SEO primer from a third party SEM company or any of the other hundreds of sources of basic SEO information and think that that is all they need. I say ‘I don’t really think so’ because not one of these tools will match the value of having a professional SEO in charge. From Google’s to every other guide I’ve seen I see mainly dodgy tips, teasers only and flat-out red herrings (people who even mention ‘meta tag keywords,’ I’m looking at you.)

Search engine optimization may get rocked by Google Caffeine but SEOs will still be the best qualified to handle this and any other news in Search. Bits of news and occasional flurries of news are best understood in the context of the last five to ten years of changes at Google and other search engines.

In the world of SEO, links are still considered the bread and butter of most SEOs and linkbuilding is the most espoused strategy by the SEO industry. There is no doubt that inlinks will always be seen as critical to the importance of a site in search engine algorithms. However, as an SEO strategy, the practice of linkbuilding has come under increasing fire and indeed becomes more questionable all the time, as a primary SEO strategy for websites.

Long gone are the days when you could cajole naive webmasters into giving you a link for free. Everybody knows the value of a link now and webmasters routinely request a return backlink or they ask “how much is it worth to you?”

On the other side, Google threatens to penalize people who buy links or sell links. You can get away with it, until someone rats you out and then you have a long climb out of the rat hole you’re in. So as an SEO, you’ve blown some money on link buying and then actually lost traffic. What kind of a reputation does that give you, and the industry?

Today, many SEOs are singing the praises of flat site architecture; that is something I espouse as well. But how long before a well crafted flat site architecture becomes commonplace? It does not matter the age of pages involved or the age of the site. Once Googlebot can quickly find all or most of the pages on most sites, the SEO playing field, at least in the sphere of architecture, will be once again even. Mind you, that day is some ways off.

However, when looking back at the past, at the present and into the foreseeable future, my favourite strategy is still long tail content development. I have no doubt that Google values sites with many more pages. In fact, I see sites with relatively high PR, seemingly garnered only from the fact that they have a significant amount of content, whether or not that content has copious or strong backlinks from other sites or not. This is one area where you can’t fake it – either you have the original content or you don’t.

Of course, it is not enough to simply have content – that content has to be crafted to meet the long tail. Good SEOs know how to properly wind in some latent semantic indexing, with just the right mix of keyword rich content and actual substance that might get you some organic links. This is the one area of traditional SEO where you can still work and know that you are doing what Google in fact wants you to do and can have more confidence than most marketers and corporations that you know what you are doing and they very likely will not.

I see over and over again, opportunities to work with company’s developers, marketers and editorial staff to leverage their already existing content to create copious pages that target the long tail of content – that long list of keyword variations related to their particular industry – where it is easy and relatively cheap to do so and where they do not know the value of this strategy. I’ve seen lots of websites grow traffic significantly simply be creating copious pages that meet their potential users down the long tail.

I’m getting those pages online ahead of other SEOs, getting backlinks to those pages ahead of them, and having those pages age (gain authority) ahead of other SEOs.

I see the long tail content strategy I implemented on some old built-for-SEO sites – built long before Chris Anderson started even blogging on the subject – still working very well for those sites.

In my humble opinion, long tail content development is a sure fire SEO traffic-building technique that still really does not get enough attention and respect in the SEO industry. It’s something lost on many companies and web businesses and it’s something that still requires some SEO expertise and experience.

There was a time, not very long ago, when there were few or no search engine optimization companies in Kitchener. But as with the industry everywhere, they seem to be coming out of the woodwork.

If I google and look around at search engine optimization companies in Kitchener, I see a few names that I know among the results. I know Nardo Kuitert of fergus-ontario.com, (okay, so technically in Fergus), from a few years ago, back in the day when we were both freelancing for a company called Geosign. I barely know Ashish Kothari, only because he found me on linkedin.com.  I do not know who SEO Expertise is in Cambridge, nor do I know who runs Just Say On. (What is that supposed to mean, by the way?) There’s some company in Waterloo called Local Search Engine Marketing.  (Apparently their area of expertise is listing companies in Google’s Local Business Results?) Of course, just down the road from Kitchener-Waterloo (home of the Blackberry!) the inimitable Rae Hoffman makes her home in Guelph. (…At least the last I heard.) Other results include AroundKW, aka Kim Burnett, the extremely helpful web host for a number of sites I own…. and as well, some company with the interesting name of Lift Media.

I have little doubt that the area can sustain this number of search engine optimization companies. And I am still of the opinion that Kitchener Waterloo companies are by and large quite ignorant of the web (part of a national pattern, apparently). Also, the area still really lacks a strong web publishing presence, in spite of the area’s supposed designation as the Technology Triangle. (For my part, I am working on increasing web publishing in this area.) Most of the technology in this area is still software or software-based.

To further argue this, let me point out that there have been no great web successes in Kitchener-Waterloo; no Diggs, no Flickrs, not much at all…. just a RIM …. and a Geosign.

Anyway, search engine optimization (SEO) in Kitchener-Waterloo is – just as it is everywhere – still in its juvenile phase. (That sentence, with its silly link, and this post, with its silly subject and title both exemplify how juvenile SEO still is, currently). But anyway, to all my competition, I say, may the best SEO company in KW win the most business!

Todd Friesen has written a good piece on the ridiculous assumption so many website owners seem to have, that they should be #1, whether they deserve it or not. It’s worth linking to: You Don’t Deserve #1.

A while ago, Rand Fishkin gave a great whiteboard on flat site architecture. Implicit in his discussion was the fact that you can create a one million page site with every page very visible to search engines – if you execute the architecture correctly.

I did a redrawing of his flat site map for a client today. My graphic skills suck. But the concept is definitely smart.

I have heard the offhand statement “search engine optimization is not rocket science” a number of times lately. As if this statement is somehow witty or helpful in discussing SEO.  Of course search engine optimization is not rocket science.

But anyone with a bit of real experience in SEO will tell you this – there are a ton of subtleties to wade through in this industry. While it is not rocket science (or brain surgery, as the other cliche goes), it is most definitely diligent work that should not be done by inexperienced amateurs. There  is a ton to be said for experience.

For example, have you ever  been page one for a term that actually has over 100,000 searches a month? Neither have most rocket scientists and brain surgeons, Mr. Notsowitty.

The following things can be said about SEO, though:

- It is search engine optimization, a specialized knowledge. You can buy it for cheap but I will tell you, you almost always get what you pay for.

- True, worthwhile SEO is a many-splendoured thing that mixes long tail content development, robust backlink gathering, social media awareness and a mixture of many other things, to create what has been called “a tasty soup.”

- True SEO can’t be learned at a conference and can’t be taught.

Learning how to get legitimate ranking for tough keywords and to acquire significant traffic comes only with experience and nitty gritty work. If you don’t have experience and/or the time to acquire it and to do the nitty gritty, you’ll have to pay for the use of someone else’s experience and time. And you’re far better off doing that anyway.

And by the way: Rocket science is also not brain surgery, and vice versa, but I’ll bet you never hear people at a rocket science conference, saying things like, “Look, rocket science is not brain surgery….”

Only rocket science is rocket science. And do space shuttles even use rocket science? Or do they use space shuttle science, in which case rocket science is obsolete? I don’t know but in any case, I do not think SEO will be any time soon.