Authority

In the context of “an authoritive site”.  There was a point when people would refer to authority sites and mean the likes of the BBC, DMOZ (back in the day), Yahoo and other mainstream web properties.  Now it really just refers to “any site that doesn’t have hidden text on it”.

I’m really not sure what people think “authority” means, but the term is batted around so often (usually as part of a “why did Google penalise my site – I’m an authority in my niche” type posts) that it has lost all meaning.  Think it through – will anyone outside the SEO industry have any clue what you are talking about when you refer to authoritative sites (because, let’s face it, you really mean “high PR” sites but are just too embarrassed to mention PageRank).

Ethical SEO

I raised this one years ago – it’s still with us.  Why won’t it just die?  Ethics have absolutely nothing to do with SEO – we’re not powering websites with baby tears and puppy dog tails…

Again, another BS term that has no meaning outside the SEO world.

Panda

Just.  Fuck.  Off.

I really hate Google for 2011.  The Panda updates have really sparked up a wealth of paranoid theories, particularly amongst those who have just got into SEO in the past 4 or 5 years or so.  Those going back longer than that remember more frequent (and brutal) updates so 2011 is really just business as usual.

Now we have a host of SEOs – wait, no – scratch that – not even just SEOs – anyone in the digital industry who thinks they know a bit about SEO – anyone with a vague knowledge about SEO has decided to regurgitate the speculation posted on forums and blogs as “advice”.  It has gotten to the point that people are taking vague offhand statements from Google employees and turning them into SEO advice.  I read a news article (yes, on a proper industry news site) where the writer actually suggested that going through a website and correcting spelling errors would be (part of) a solution to combat the Panda update.  PUUUUUUUUKE!

Matt Cutts says

Poor Matt.  Probably the best and the worst thing to happen to the SEO industry.  I get the distinct impression that he is regularly torn between his normal geeky nature to do things properly and internal corporate chains that keep him from doing so.  I think his biggest mistake was making the effort with the SEO world early on (but in retrospect that was an entirely profitable exercise for Google), but unable, politically, to be as transparent as we want him to be (and he probably would like to be as well).

The guy can’t catch a break really.  Ever minor statement he makes is analysed, quoted and misquoted with abandon.   The worst of it – and the reason it really irritates me – is that the quotes tend to be thrown into a discussion as a definitive answer to whatever vague question was asked.  They’re not the definitive answer – they may be useful titbits of information from time to time, but in no way definitive.  Even if Matt was able and willing to provide clear information, it’s still just tech advice coming from a company with a commercial interest in YOU doing things in a certain way.   Their way.  And that shouldn’t be what your entire business strategy gravitates around.

Google +

It sucks.  SUCKS.  Nothing to do with this post, but though I’d just throw it in there.  Google did search reasonably well, and Adwords / Adsense were a good idea at the time, but since then…

(I really hate Adsense.  It could be done so much better for everyone involved….don’t get me started…)

Thin Content

Forgot to add this one earlier.  Most of us know what thin content is, but there seems to be an odd confusion in the industry as to whether or not your content is actually “thin” or not.  The problem stems from the SEO perception that the content they churn out en mass is even halfway as good as professionally written copy.  It isn’t.  And I’m not just talking about the old school, keyword density era which gave us such hits as:

Come to Bob’s big red widget shop for the best big red widgets in town.  We have such a wide selection of big red widgets, you won’t need to go anywhere else for your big red widgets.

I think the perception is that because you’ve taken the time to write more than 50 words before moving onto the next page that your content isn’t “thin”.  Let’s put into context.  There was a time where many web designers would just skip the whole “let’s get a proper graphic designer to design this” part of the process and go ahead and design it themselves.  Guess what SEOs have been doing with copy?

“Thin content” is a vague term.  It means any rubbish content.  That can mean 10 words of rubbish or an entire essay.  I’ve been guilty of this in the past, and I’m sure many other SEOs have too.  It can also refer to duplicate, semi duplicate or repurposed content.  The only real question you need to ask yourself is, “would this page still be ranking highly if it wasn’t for my l33t SEO skillz?”.  If not, then there’s a good chance your content sucks.

So, anything you’d like to add to the list?

Scott

For those not entirely in the loop of Google’s frantic attempt at world domination, here’s the short version.  Search dominance.  Created crap ad program.  Shafted the competition (affiliates).  Bought out a bunch of companies.  Shafted the competition in more markets.  Kept quiet about the fact that they were harvesting data from all their free products.  Laughed while Bing poured money down the drain trying to compete.  Sucker punched the webmaster community who had been providing aforementioned free data for all those years.  Cried when Facebook wouldn’t share their toys.  Currently pouring money away trying to compete in the social media market.  Clearly not seeing the comparisons between Bing trying to compete in search and Google trying to compete in social.  Now trying to leverage mammoth traffic levels to hook people into sharing their personal data like they did to webmasters (before shafting them).

Did I miss anything?

You’ll never be Facebook

People like Facebook (pardon the pun).  I mean, real people. Not companies or marketing professionals who have had the carrot dangled in front of their mouths, salivating at the prospect of even an imperceptible boost to the holy grail of Google rankings.  You know how Google has played their cards quite close to their chest for all these years – no transparency when it comes to rankings and penalties – webmaster community climbing over each other to try and appease the mighty Google.

In many ways, the webmaster community were both the reason for Google’s success and a victim of it.  Perhaps that’s why Google thinks these early adopters will help kick off their social media domination.

But I don’t think things will work out that way.  Look at how Facebook started out – students – groups of friends – a network that built up naturally.  Now look at how Google+ started out – businesses & marketing professionals – SEOs (who make a living from gaming Google), many of whom have fairly negative opinions of Google.  That’s a somewhat “poisoned” starting group of users – how will that ever grow organically like Facebook did?  It may become something big, but I don’t think it’ll ever become the social network Facebook is.

How much spam did other social media channels have within months of launch?

There are already loads of “buy Google plus one” services out there, but I guess those were previously established networks geared up for Digg, Facebook and Twitter spamming – so a G+ service offering isn’t that hard to do.  But there are still quite a lot of people shooting at G+ for such a new product and although Google have faced that particular issue for years with their search product, will it be too much for a social network to handle?

People can deal with poor quality search results – in fact, most normal (non SEO geeks) are none the wiser.  People tend to notice when spam makes their way into their social circle.  I haven’t used G+ much except for a bit of a play around when it was launched – I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it so I didn’t stick with it.  But I do see loads of people on Twitter complain about it because their business orientated social circle is suddenly poisoned with spam and irrelevant crap like photos of kittens and random jokes.

And there’s the stumbling block for Google.  They’ve taken a step forward on the basis that business users will drive their product to the next stage, but the reality is that it isn’t a particularly good social network for business users and it’s a pale competitor to Facebook for regular users.  That’s the flaw in the strategy.  Look at new navigation bar – I use search (I have a toolbar for that).  I used maps (I have an app for that).  I use Youtube (I have an app for that).  I use Adwords, Adsense and Analytics (those haven’t even made it to the primary – or secondary navigation).

The whole move reeks of geek logic applied to business.  Bland designs and high ambitions with no real substance.

In some situations this isn’t a bad thing – searching for an event was always badly handled by Google who have historically favoured older content over new which means last year’s events would commonly turn up at the top of the results.  So this change can be good in that respect, as with a number of other possible searches such as news results – searching for “cricketers fixing scam” results in a load of new pages – most of which were published in the past 24 hours (and not just embedded news results).  Good times!

But the post from the Google blog always mentions product reviews as a potential target for this fresh tweak!  This is a big one.  News and events are easy – very time based pieces of content.  But how does a search engine differentiate between different types of static content such as a product review?  Importantly, how does it tell the difference between a product review and a bog standard static page?  Rich snippet markup perhaps may be a good source here, but not every website has adopted this approach.  This reeks of an update that is going to have a lot of causalities!

How would you react?

SEO has always been quite a mid to long term strategy (well, back in the day you could rank overnight for any term quite easily, but things have slowed down since then) – only small pockets of the industry can have fun with instant rankings – news optimisation, blogsearch, PPC, etc.   But if Google is rolling out a new jazzy instant rank algorithm, how much of a red rag to a bull is that for the SEO community?

Seriously, how much of the industry will shift from creating good content to churning out low quality “fresh” content in whatever form that may entail – rubbish comments, reviews, slight editorial changes, republishing reviews, etc  – all to maintain “temporary” rankings over a longer period of time?  Strangely, I think this change will benefit the more technically minded “black hat” community (I used the term loosely, but you know who I mean) who can autogenerate “fresh” content in much larger scales, compared to the content generation community.

From the Google Blog:

Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Well, yes and no.  I want the best, most informative reviews and those aren’t necessarily the most recent ones.  In cases they will be, but is Google good enough to work out which is which?  Or am I going to get the most recent reviews regardless?  This could really hurt review sites that have taken a lot of time to push users to write decent reviews.

The Panda update really riled a lot of SEOs – many of whom spent a lot of time following Google’s guidelines reasonably well (OK a lot pushed the boat out, but not all the way into spam territory).  Are we looking at a scenario where those who are legitimately making an effort to produce a decent web business lose out and those who like to game the system have more tools in their arsenal to do so?

Perhaps not, although it’s fun to wear the conspiracy theory hat for a while!

Perhaps this is a logical progression from the Panda updates which, in one way or another, did force a purge of borderline low quality sites from the index?  Maybe Panda was a prelude to a bigger quality / freshness push in which this is the next stage?  Could Google have even attempted this a year ago pre-Panda or was there too much SEO-heavy content (and you know what I mean by that!) to drown out the reputable content sources?  Caffeine implements the infrastructure, Panda flushes the system and (insert freshilicious name) brings us closer to pure real time search that is has the potential to be fairly spam free?

Maybe Google is certain that they have it right this time – or maybe it’s going to go tits up and really annoy a lot of SEOs (and frankly annoying the one group of people who have the skills and knowledge to poison your core product is kinda stupid)?  What do you think?  Should be interesting all the same – will be keeping an eye on analytics over the next few days!

Related articles

• Google Panda Update Rolls Out Worldwide (fusednation.com)
• Google Rich Snippets Tool (fusednation.com)
• Announcing: The Complete Google Algo History (seomoz.org)

• Does Google like link buying?  No, of course not it’s manipulation of their link based algo.
• Can Google implement a penalty?  Yes, of course they do it for loads of sites.
• Can Google ban a website?  Sure, see above.
• Will Google ban a website for buying links?  I’m not so sure.

Yeh, I hear people talking about it all the time.  Usually newbie bloggers and SEOs that decide to lecture people on SEO and spout out some regurgitated BS that is basically what Google says publicly.  But has anyone ever actually come across a solid black and white example of where a website got banned for buying links?  I’ve been looking for one and as someone who has worked in search for over 10 years, I’m struggling to find a solid example.

Let’s break down the link buying debate

Some SEOs say buying links is fine and others say it can hurt you.  But these arguments generally boil down to one core point – can an external factor (that could be controlled by my competitor) hurt my rankings?   In general the answer is no.  Not because it’s impossible – if you have a big enough network or enough money you can screw someone up royally.  But because it’s impractical.  So much so that the average business is unlikely to be the victim of an intentional link attack.

But that’s kind of the point I’m leaning towards here – if link buying was so brutal for you SEO campaign, then wouldn’t more websites be affected?  Wouldn’t there be more people moaning on the SEO and business forums about their loss of rankings?  The only people I see complaining these days are thin content websites who frankly should have seen that one coming…

Where does Google stand?

Well, obviously Google doesn’t like us buying or selling links.   So every piece of carefully crafted doctrine that escapes from Googleplex tells us that buying links is bad.  And every mindless zombie that laps up everything that Google poops down their neck will nod in unison while they chant, “buying links is bad”…

But other than the chat (which as you can tell, I’ve taken with a pinch of salt for a very long time now), what hard facts are there?  I Googled it a bit earlier and only could find DP forum thread from 2008 where a guy got banned because he bought 30,000 backlinks in one month (lol) and some Google Groups discussions with paranoid webmasters.  Maybe a couple of high profile cases where Google had to act but other than that…

And how would Google manage link buying on a large scale?  I’m not talking about brokerage services which have a notable footprint that can be algorithmically filtered, but the individual actions of millions of website owners and SEOs?

The reality is that Google can’t start throwing around penalties for every Joe Bloggs who buys a link.  The fact that they only just updated their spam report form should tell a story in itself.  Link manipulation, regardless of the technique used, has to be the main concern for the folk at Google – anyone else get the impression they are beginning to accept the fact that they can’t cope with problem “algorithmically”?  Case by case reviews of link buying examples may be on the cards, but realistically, can even a human tell if I bought the link or my competitor did?

We all buy links

I don’t care what your favoured link building technique is – we all buy links.  Any client paying for link building services buys links.  Any blogger submitting a guest post to a news site (or even a crap blog) is buying links.  Any forum signature or directory submission is buying links (time spent producing content for other websites = money for the other websites).  Linkbait is buying links – hell, it’s the ultimate achievement of a link monkey – free, natural links (in exchange for loads of research, hard work, etc).  In fact a lot of what SEO’s do is just link buying.  Google calls it link popularity.  The business world calls it marketing.

Like I said before, I’m split on this topic.  I have no fear that Google will ban a website for buying a handful of links mixed in with other link building tactics.  I believe they can ban websites for doing that if they want, I’m just not sure if they have the scalable means to implement that without human intervention.  I also believe that quite a lot of what Google says is idealist BS and taken far too literally by far too many people.  I believe it’s possible for a competitor to poison your rankings via links, I’d say 99% of the websites out there are insignificant enough not to need to worry about this, anymore than they need to worry about being slapped by Google.  I believe that anyone that pushes to far may be brought back down to Earth with a bang, but for most of us – the vast majority who play it safe and don’t rock the boat too much – there is no real danger…

So I’d like to ask for some feedback on this one.  What are your opinions on link buying?  A legitimate business move with little or no risk, or something stupid that should be restricted to throw away websites?  Is it just a necessary evil for the casino/viagra/etc people?

Can anyone put up an example of a legitimate (non spammy) website that was banned for buying links?  Added – clarification (for the old and gray), I’m not expecting anyone to post specific examples of their own or client sites that were banned – just looking for discussion on the subject one way or another.  The point being there aren’t many examples that aren’t either high profile examples or full time spam efforts.

I mean seriously – you could have saved me time.  You could have saved yourself time (getting what you want in the process).  But no, you decided to spam with a thinly veiled compliments about my site.   Check it;

I’ve taken the time to read around it and explore your site, for which I’ve been impressed with and was wandering if I could add a text-link or article on your homepage? I thank you in advance for your time and look forward to discuss this with you in more details.

Well, if you’re wandering then I best get you a link so you don’t get lost, eh?  And I am also looking forward to discuss the plural details…

(Yeh, I know – me having a go at someone’s spelling and grammar – pot vs kettle time!)

I’ll avoid my usual game of outing the client (big brand job board), but will take a swing at the agency!   VCCP search, who say on their about us page;

We’re not another big agency. Our vision is to be better, not bigger. So we find talented people and put their expertise together with the most advanced technology. We keep our team small and lean, and we don’t compromise on the quality of our people.

Publicly spamming random blogs with badly written paid link requests is hardly “better” now is it?  I love the small team / big tech approach though – spammers must be like Gods to you guys – the epitome of low manpower and high-tec wizardry working in unison!

Don’t take this all too seriously guys – just a bit of fun!   Maybe review your link building strategy a little though!

To go over some of the points in the article (and many of the points were valid – just some take a bit of imagination to believe they are high risk SEO techniques);

Link Building

• Buy 5000 links for $19.  So what I can pay $19 and get my competitor penalised?
• Paid links on high PR sites.  See above.
• Large scale recips.  Same link profile as any blogger with an extensive blogroll.
• Hidden links in WordPress themes.  Is this a dig at hidden links (clearly a bad idea) or WP run of site link marketing?  Many legitimate business sites sponsor organisations and get ROS links in return.  Very common link profile – no danger of penalty.
• Artificial link profile.  Something else I can do to get my competitor penalised then?
• Wrong language links.  The average webmaster has zero control over that.
• Gaining too many links too fast.  Crap links, sure.  No chance any penalty / filter for natural link growth, even unusual link growth.  Solid marketing campaigns can result in link growth spikes.  To suggest that this isn’t a natural activity or that it is a high risk SEO activity…

Outbound Links

• Broken links on page.  Eh, has this been tested?  I recently revived an old static HTML website with tonnes of broken links – moved everything over to a CMS and cleaned up shop.  Can’t say I saw a huge change in rankings for basically the same content.
• Too many OBLs, or none at all.   Too many – perhaps – it’ll dilute the PR passing to your internal pages and rankings are impacted.  Not a penalty – just stupid web design.  None at all – loads of sites don’t link out, certainly don’t get penalised for it.

Content

• Duplicate on your site / elsewhere.  Can’t result in substantial ranking drop.  Duplicate content is ignored.  Plenty of legitimate reasons content may be duplicate and unscrupulous ones to try and harm your site.  Search engines aren’t so stupid to penalise that.  Few exceptions are where search engines can’t determine the original owner (by devious intention or mistake) but 9 times out of 10 those problems can be fixed with good SEO.

Ads

• Too many ads.  I’m with this one in principle to be honest – I want it to be true.  However, having tested some Pandisised sites by reducing ad / copy ratio, I haven’t seen any improvements (and I’m sure there aren’t other issues with the sites).  Haven’t read any reports of people successfully testing this theory (without also implementing other stuff too).  I do want this to be true.  I think it may just be bullshit pedalled by Google employees so they don’t have to clean up their own Adsense spam network.

Google Filters

• Multiple H1 tags.  “Google assumes multiple H1s are a trick to spam its index” – no, I don’t think Google does.  I’m pretty sure anyone who knows how to spam just sticks to a single H1 tag and most websites with multiple H1 tags are just bugs, coding errors and laziness.

Like I said, there were some good points in the article but a whole bunch ranged from questionable to ridiculous!  To be honest I half think the article was just link bait to get some IBLs.  I nofollowed mine.   Sorry guys!

Scott

…frankly Mr Hypothetical Client, you’re hard work – indeed, it’s a wonder any SEO is willing to take you on!

It’s not your fault really. We SEOs regularly shoot ourselves in the foot (usually while aiming at our competitor’s feet with one eye closed). I mean, you go to pretty much any SEO agency or freelancer website or blog and you won’t have to look far to find some crass, snide dig at other SEOs in a vain attempt to position whatever variation on the same strategy works and what doesn’t.

Case and point – any mention of “white hat” and “black hat”, anywhere in your website copy (golden oldie here, but check it out – SEO agency copywriting sins). Seriously, are there any clients out there that a) know the difference or b) actually care? Most SEOs don’t! In fact, in many ways any mention of headwear of any fashion tends to be a sign of SEO immaturity – essentially a vague attempt by one camp or another to justify a particular set of SEO techniques (which really boil down to figuring out your own risk v reward v resources ratio and absolutely nothing to do with “ethics” whatsoever). I still see SEO agencies putting up job adverts for “white hat” SEOs…I mean, seriously…

So, what are we dealing with here?

Well, on the client side there could be a huge range of issues;

• Paid too much for SEO previously so unwilling to pay as much again.
• Disenchanted with the potential of SEO.
• Perhaps knows a little about SEO. DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!
• Maybe has limited resources.
• Potentially has unrealistic needs and wants.
• May have an over-reliance on SEO.
• Could just be they want SEO but don’t really need it or know why they want it.

On the flip side, the SEO industry gives birth to such a variety of bastard children that there should be a Jerry Springer special at some point so we can figure who’s to blame for this mess. It’s Google. Google’s to blame. So our SEO options can tick one or more of these boxes;

• Web designer that learned a little bit about SEO and decided to start offering SEO services because that’s what everyone wants.
• Up and coming SEO – spent a few years as an account manager and decided to take a swing at technical SEO.
• Web design agency that offers SEO – either take a swing at it themselves or outsource.
• A proper SEO agency – usually relying on a few individuals to do their tech SEO stuff.
• Full service marketing agencies – again may do their SEO stuff in house or outsource.
• Newbies that have optimised a few small websites and think that’s all there is to SEO.
• Limited service “SEOs” – just keyword research + meta tags, or just link building.
• Freelancer that’s been about for a while – probably charges a fair bit (probably too much).
• SEO superstars – pro bloggers, speakers, etc. Charge a premium.

Basically, a bunch of different people doing essentially the same thing. That is, the same thing for YOUR website – not for ANY website. I should explain…

Websites. Are. Unique. Duh!

I know people like to think there’s a solid underlying strategy to the SEO process. In some ways there is. In other, more real ways, there isn’t. Well, not in the way you’re thinking about anyway.

The SEO process, when reduced to the bare minimum, is simple. Content and links basically. Easy stuff and every SEO knows at least this much (you hope…), but each individual SEO will have their own opinion on how to balance these two elements and this leads conflict and inevitable confusion.

For example, one SEO may be a fan of the content approach where you introduce some killer content to your website, which will result in loads of natural inbound links and therefore rankings aplenty. Good times! However, his link obsessed counterpart might not like this approach. There’s a degree of lack of control in using the content strategy, so a more solid link building campaign can be a better to get results in many cases.

So which do you hire? Well in most cases going for a SEO that can do all of that stuff would be best – generally the folks who stick to a specific set of techniques may be a little naive when it comes to other areas of SEO (they stick with what they know works), although that’s probably an unfair generalisation – I’m not suggesting SEOs are one trick ponies, as most are fairly versatile.

You do need to pick someone who is an appropriate fit for your business though. That SEO superstar may cost more than he or she is worth for your small business website. Also, you may want to consider what areas of SEO you want to address. If you want a content strategy, then why not hire a professional writer instead of SEO? If you want links then why not hire a PR or marketing person? Define your needs and try to match up those needs with potential deliverables.

How do I make that decision?

It isn’t easy, but there are a bunch of simple questions you can ask yourself to help you work out your options.

How big is my website?

1. Less than a hundred pages – you don’t need to be paying loads for SEO work. Someone with similar small site experience will be fine. At this level, even a superficial knowledge of SEO and websites can get you by.
2. Mid-sized – less than 50k pages – you should be looking at a SEO with a good few years experience with optimising CMSs. There’s lots more to SEO at this level and it becomes less of a worry that your SEO is wrong about something and more of a worry about what they just don’t know.
3. Large – 50k+ pages – find a pro – someone who has worked with big sites before. It’s a whole new ballgame at that level and quite a lot of SEO providers out there can’t handle a job of that size.

How much do I have to spend each year?

1. A little – money is tight. Then think newbie freelancers or small agencies. Good value for money – when you get into the realms of big brand stuff, providers start charging a premium. May have to shop around to get a decent provider though.
2. Loads – we’re huge! Then bigger agency, reputable individual or hire someone full time. Generally you get what you pay for. For an individual that’s a reflection of experience – for agencies it may be inflated prices because of their brand.

What other stuff do I need?

There are arguments for and against going with full serviced agencies over specialist agencies. My personal preference is the former rather than the latter – there’s no element of SEO that can’t be done well by a full serviced agency. Granted there may be more SEO types in a specialist agency, but in my experience there are fewer than you might think. Just because an agency boasts 200 employees, doesn’t mean they’re all SEOs. Chances are they’re mostly sales / accountant management / pretend “vertical specialists” / etc.

If you get any chat about specialist agencies being more experienced than full service agencies, take it with a pinch of salt. There are some excellent specialist SEO agencies out there (Distilled, Hobo Web, etc) and a few up and coming agencies that are equally good. However there are loads that just don’t have half a clue between them…so don’t be caught in the hard sell.

When will I see results?

Don’t be a d**k. Did you not read my “Websites. Are. Unique. Duh!” section? You can believe whatever plucked-out-of-thin-air timescales you’re told, or accept the fact that no one really knows. Stuff we do know;

• Can take from around 1 minute to 1 month for search engines reindex your website (so at least that long if you’re making changes to the site).
• Factoring in links can take longer – search engines need same amount of time to index other sites and calculate changes (mostly done on the fly these days).
• Can take anywhere from days to weeks for you to receive your SEO work (via report or physical changes implemented).
• If your website is underperforming, then some good SEO work should result in better rankings quite quickly. If you are performing well in a competitive market and want to improve further, then progress can be slower.

How much does SEO cost?

More than nothing and less than the profit businesses generally get from SEO work. And no, price isn’t a reflection of quality.

What deliverables do I need?

Most SEOs should be able to offer your some kind of ranking reports and an idea of what links they’ve managed to get for you. Some agencies will bump up the costs of reporting to account for some fancy bespoke reporting system they’ve knocked together. Realistically though, how interested are you? Is there anyone in your organisation that is going to do anything with the information other than look at the ranking figures and make sure they’re going in the right direction? Plenty of cheap rank checkers you can buy to do that. No need to be oversold on reporting you don’t need.

How competitive is my market?

Most people have an idea how competitive their own market is online. If in doubt, search for main keyword and see how many competing sites there are. Less than 8 million results is reasonably uncompetitive, although it depends on the market as some are more SEO heavy than others. Expect to pay more and need a more experienced SEO the more competitive your market is.

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The basic rule of thumb here is to try your best at quantifying your needs so you don’t end up paying for too much or too little. As I said earlier, you don’t need to go with the big agency if you only have a small website and similarly, you shouldn’t trust your million page website with that newbie just because he’s cheap.

I can trust my SEO, right?

NO! There’s a good chance he may steal your children! But even if he doesn’t do that (hardly ever happens these days – there’s no money in it…), you need to manage your SEO like any other service provider. Sure, they’re the experts (or should be), but it’s still your business and you have the final word on what happens to your website. As I said before, ethics doesn’t come into play in SEO, but quality does and you need to be the one that defines that standard.

For example, there are many different ways of optimising Page title tags. Some SEOs will prefer a “Keyword, Keyword, Keyword” approach – others a “Welcome to my Keyword Business” approach. Which do you prefer? In many cases your Page title is the first piece of text people read when finding your site online (it’s the link text used in search results).

Similarly, would you be happy if your copy was re-written by your SEO to something that didn’t read quite as well, but had keywords in it? I’m not saying you can’t have the best of both worlds – just that some SEO providers may not be able to provide the eloquent optimised copy that you need.

I’ve seen all manner of rubbish done to client websites in the name of SEO – providers adding loads of embedded links to their own (questionable) websites or loading up client websites with affiliate links. These guys are at the bottom of the barrel – most SEOs are pretty honest and should provide you with some kind of log of changes to your site.

Final word…

You can’t beat personal recommendations from similar businesses. If your mate’s brother optimised his small business website with success, then chances are he’ll be good for you too. However, that doesn’t mean he’ll be a good choice for your sister’s ecommerce website.

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Scott – Follow me on Twitter

Worth having a play around with and good to test out differnet options.  Remember, Bing likes rich snippets too!

If your website or client’s websites are in any way local, then rich snippet markup is almost as important as getting listed on review sites and Google Places, etc these days.  Local seach is one crowded place – there are loads of different players trying out different things and as usual the search engines are trying to aggregate the data rather than doing their own thing (although Google is doing a little bit of both).

Think about what it means to be able to control how your local business listing appears within search results.  Have a bland title and description, OR;

• Address & Map
• Star rating and reviews
• Contact details
• Deep links to your key content
• Take away prime space from your lesser ranking competitors!

Most standard CMSs should be simple enough to add in rich snippets in and freebie pieces of software like WordPress will have plenty of plugins (although the WP one doesn’t work with the current build…).

On a search query I’ve been working on today, the potential client is 2nd place (normal listing).  1st place is a a competitor with all the stuff I just listed.  Screenshot of the SERPs is all that’s needed to secure the pitch.

No brainer.

So what’s the deal then?

For those who don’t know, Google allows you to add sitemaps via Google Webmaster Tools – basically you give G a big list of all the URLs that make up your site so they can do their thing and start ranking them number 1 for every term you possibly want.

Well, not really.  While Google WMT does offer some nice toys to play with, the whole “indexing your site” is essentially fool’s gold.

The problem being…

…if Google can’t index your site the old fashioned way, then there’s no real point in taking the quick fix solution.

Most small to medium sites will rarely see problems with indexing (unless things are just really wrong), but for big sites (100k+ pages), there can be small pockets of content that just don’t get indexed.

Why is this the case?

A few issues combine to create problems with deep indexing for big sites – Google crawls the site in chunks and allocates a quota to the indexing cycle.  If your site structure is poor then Google doesn’t find a few pages here and there.  Even if your site structure is solid, if you don’t have the overall PageRank, Google may just choose not to index 100% deep into your site (the theory being that the content is too low quality to bother indexing).

And where do XML sitemaps come in?

Well a few SEOs will use XML sitemaps as a bandaid solution to any indexing problems.  Sometimes a false victory is better than none at all, I guess!  The problem is that XML sitemaps don’t really solve any problems at all – they just mask them, and frankly make the SEO job that bit harder for the next SEO who will inevitably come in to replace the first one!

It’s easy to use Google results to identify problems with a new client site – the site: command used well can identify pages that aren’t indexed and that knowledge leads on to identifying problem areas in the site that then can be tackled.  But if the site: command shows 100% pages indexed, then you need to figure out where the problem is without the extra little bit of data.  Not impossible, but that little bit more difficult, particularly with larger sites.

So should I avoid using Google Sitemaps?

Not all, there’s some use to the data you get from WMT.  Just don’t use sitemaps to get your site indexed unless you are 100% sure there are no internal issues that are preventing indexing.  If there are, then deal with those first.

MG

What we’re not dealing with here is the technical side of SEO – the link juice, the internal link structures, the on page optimisation, the domain authority and so on - let’s assume you’re on the ball with these things already.  Think of those factors as channels of promotion and packaging – what we’re talking about here is the product itself – the content.

It’s the content that tends to so undervalued in the SEO world, despite the fact that every SEO pretty much has “content is king” engraved on their eyeballs from the early days in their career.  This is largely down to SEO deriving from a very technical group of people; at a time where simply listing more keywords on the page was the key to success.  Fortunately the market has matured since then and we’re slowly edging out the keyword filled sites in lieu of better content, but bland, average sites are still rampant and no doubt the owners wonder why their rankings aren’t as strong as they could be.

The answer is simple – both people and search engines want good results, yet a large part of SEO is about essentially ranking *any* page for relevant terms, rather than creating a page that *deserves* to rank for that term. 

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not suggesting that SEO is getting it wrong – quite the opposite in fact, many SEOs get it right with style!  More than that though, the SEO industry has encouraged a level of competition amongst websites that drives innovation and development – I think we would have a very different web today if it wasn’t for the SEO industry.

The point is that in many cases, SEO is kinda just tagged on the end of a project, almost as an afterthought – almost a case of “we want to rank for x, y or z – go and do it”.  The effectiveness of the work tends to boil down to the skills and experience of the SEO behind it, and I while I do think that’s always and should be important, the main deciding factor should be down to the quality of the page.  The two aren’t mutually exclusive – let’s look at the points to building a category killing page;

Define your objectives

What is your page all about?  By defining the purpose of your page from the outset, you can not only easily accommodate any SEO details, but also ensure the page design includes everything you need it to in order to maximise the benefit you get from your traffic.

Some questions to ask yourself:

1. What do competing pages offer in terms of content?
2. What am I trying to achieve with this page?
3. What content do I need on this page?
4. What content *don’t* I need on this page?
5. What can I offer that no one else is?
6. What makes this page better than other similar pages?
7. What will users searching for my targeted search term expect to find on this page?
8. How important is this page to my business strategy?

The answers to these questions begin to give you a very strong picture of what your page should look like and importantly, what content it should have in it.  The point is, the temptation might just be to throw up a blog or other CMS to manage your content – is this really appropriate for what you are trying to achieve?  Essentially, what you want to avoid:

• Product pages with nothing more than a couple of lines of product description text (the page will have less chance of ranking).
• Link bait pages that don’t link internally to other key pages (the page will pass on less benefit to other key pages).
• Pages that are swamped with ads to the detriment of user experience (conversion rates will drop).
• Sales pages that say nothing (or worse, too much) about your product or service (as above).
• Bland, uninteresting pages that are no different to any other competing page (the fickle surfer will lose interest and leave).
• Generic, catch-all pages that don’t really fuffil the requirements of the visitors that end up on the page (pseudo-doorway pages).

Your content is not just about copywriting – it’s about creating a product that you package in your website and promote via SEO (and other marketing channels).

Plan and prioritise your layout

When you have your product concept nailed, it’s time to design it.  This is a critical stage of the process – your page design and layout is the first facet of your product that your visitors will see and in many cases it will be the deciding factor on whether they:

• Continue reading.
• Engage with your website (buy something / post a review / etc).
• Link to your site from their own (I rarely link to sites I don’t like the look of).
• Spread the joy (social media).

Many sites will push ads in front of the user as soon as they land on the page (i.e. above the fold / before the content), which is fair enough if this is the objective of the page.  But in cases where the objective is more complicated (link bait, product sales, attracting reviews, etc), then excessive ads or internal fluff (navigation and so on) can detract from this objective.

It’s very easy to ignore this when using a CMS – template driven pages can be a PITA to redesign on a case by case basis – you might not to take the time or spend the resources on doing this.  But forget that for the moment – that’s something that can be considered at the next stage.  Right now, you’re looking for a best case scenario – what’s the absolutely best solution that will meet your requirements?  Ask yourself these questions:

1. What’s the ultimate objective of the page?  Keep repeating this to yourself at every stage – it’s critical you don’t lose sight of this.
2. Which pieces of content are most important?  Prioritise them.
3. Which pieces of content could you live without on the page?
4. What are your targeted search terms and what will users expect to find on this page?  If there are different expectations (common with generic search terms), then your design should prioritise and accommodate for them appropriately.
5. Is there anything you are offering that others aren’t?  Perhaps it’s worth highlighting this!

Now you have a solid list of requirements and priorities, your design should pretty much build itself – have a think about how far away you are from when you started.

Review and assess the situation

Your best case scenario may not be an entirely practical solution for the time being, so it’s worth going back and looking over what you’ve done and what you can achieve with the resources you have.  It’s never a bad thing to take a step back and perhaps do less than originally planned if it means you can do at least that part well. 

Your page now should be a least more than a basic block of text stuck in a bog standard template – it should:

• Have all the information a user expects when arriving at your site.
• Offer a logical structure, with clear objectives. 
• Be simple for your visitor to perform whatever action you want them to.
• Look good and give the impression of professionalism.
• Encourage people to come back to the site / link to it / syndicate your page via social media.

Moreover, it should stand out from every other page in the market.  Regardless of whether your objective is to create a page that search engines think is the best, or users think is the best, you should have a good result.  Coupled with the technical SEO bits and pieces (which I assume you know if you’re reading this!), your page will serve you well.

Of course, depending on the type of content you are promoting, this might not be the end of the story.  A killer page doesn’t necessary mean it will be a category killer – additional stages of internal and external promotion will most likely be needed, particularly in highly competitive areas (a blog post for another day), but at least you are in the game knowing your product is as solid as you can make it.

Given this is all rather bland, theoretical stuff, I’m planning on writing a follow up post with a practical example showing how to apply these points and how I might go about creating a category killing page.  Would anyone like to suggest a keyword / market / industry to use as an example?

Scott