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

They do run a PPC campaign for the term, but with 1.1 billion competing pages, perhaps it wasn’t a great idea to include that particular step in the communication process?   The site does rank number 6 after a couple of Wikipedia entries and some other unrelated stuff.  What do you think?  Is it a good idea to tie in an ad campaign with a search result that you can’t really dominate?

I can see where prompting users to search online for a term may be a good idea – for example, brand searches (assuming you don’t have any negative PR floating around the place) – but for generic terms?  The Orange campaign isn’t as problematic as it could be – after all they aren’t prompting users to search online for “mobile phones” or any other competitive phrase (in terms of quality of the competition not the quantity).

All the same, it does open the door to competitors jumping on the bandwagon and capitalising on your campaign.

It’s a similar issue to choosing a unique domain name – you don’t want users to end up at competing sites with similar names (which is one of my main arguments against using keyword domains for high ££ campaigns – although I do appreciate that in cases the benefits can outweight the pitfalls).  It’s more of a personal preference for me – I grudge spending time and money on a campaign just for other people to come along and get a free ride!  I’m oddly principled at times!

I do like the idea of using search in different ways though – it’s good to see marketers pulling search marketing into their more traditional campaigns and I think on the whole, the I Am campaign won’t really offer Orange any problems (unless their competitors decide to plough some resources in messing with the SERPs).

I remember movie launches used to be tied in with “AOL keyword searches” which I always thought was a bad idea – popular films spawn fan sites and spam sites pretty quickly.  It’s down to how easily you can control the SERPs really – it’s not that tough to dominate the top 10 for a made up keyword if you really want to – I think marketers just need to appreciate the limitations of their control over the SERPs when the campaign is launched.

Scott

It’s a common mistake SEOs make – differentiating between “direct” ranking factors and “indirect” ranking factors is very important. People just tend to make the wrong assosciations – they optimise a keyword domain site and see it rank for the keyword and assume that this is down to the keyword in the domain. It isn’t.

The strength of keywords in domains is very easy to test. Find a keyword with mild competition (say anywhere from 500k +), buy the domain, stick a page up with content that doesn’t mention the keyword (nowhere in the body copy, title, etc). Then link to the site from another site using the text “click here”.

If the appearance of keywords in the domain name were so important, then the domain would rank well. But it won’t. That’s because it used to work (circa 2002, 2003) and Google SERPs were filled with spammy keyword domains hosting scraper sites so Google heavily devalued the impact keywords in domain names.

Think about it logically. If this was such an important factor – i.e. more important than any other SEO factor as people are saying – why would Google allow this? A keyword in a domain says nothing about the quality of the content on the site – it’s something that anyone can manipulate in an instant and at very low cost.

BobsWidgets.com ranks well for “widgets” because people link to it using the text, “Bobs Widgets”. There’s a reason that marketing.com, seo.com, searchengineoptimisation.com, travel.com, food.com, etc aren’t number 1 for their respective keywords – that reason is that they have uncompetitive levels of keyword inbound link text compared to their competitors and the domain name is largely irrelevant.

That’s just the “pure SEO ranking” value however. You need to also look at other types of value that can come from keywords in domains –  it makes link building easier – people link to the site using keywords more often so rankings can come quicker because of that.

But look at the issue in a larger context – sure having “widgets” in your domain name will help you rank faster because people link to it saying “widgets”. But widgets isn’t your only keyword is it? What about the dozens, hundreds or thousands of other keywords you want to target? The appearance of “widgets” in the domain name doesn’t help them in the slightest.

For those reasons, overall keyword in domain names have very low value to even small campaigns and the overall value decreases as your campaign increases.

Personally, I wouldn’t even rank the value of this factor in my top 10 – it’s inconsequential to a SEO campaign where even a made up word as domain name (i.e. a brand) can achieve the same success just as easily.

There’s also an issue of image. I guess many people won’t realise and this is probably less and less of an issue as time passes, but there was a time when keyword domains were synonymous with spam (because as I said, spammers used to buy up keyword domains and throw up spam sites because they used to rank well because of the keyword in the domain). Personally, I ignore link requests and business requests from keyword domains for that reason – this may be the exception rather than the rule, but I believe there are probably a good percentage of website owners who feel the same.

And then the marketing issues. You spend loads of money on SEO for edinburghwidgets.com just for someone else to go ahead a buy up glasgowwidgets.com or buyedinburghwidgets.com and legally there’s nothing you can do about it – and there’s a decent chance they will outrank you and capitialise on any marketing efforts you are making. Why would you risk that as a business when you can optimise “abrand.com” just as easily?

Keywords domains are good for some applications, but I would be seriously concerned if a legitimate business wanted to spend money developing a keyword domain for their core business solely on the belief it will help them rank better.

Scott

Scott

Sound familiar?

With Google rankings being such a fad these days, I think it is important for SEOs to seriously think about how they sell their service to clients.  I see so many cases of small businesses being ripped off by SEOs who didn’t fully disclose the expenses involved from the start of the campaign.  One case comes to mind where the client paid the up front fee, received some “SEO work” (I use the term loosely) and then was stung for monthly “link building” fees.  While this pricing structure is commonplace in the SEO industry, it can lead to issues if your sales force isn’t exactly as ethical as they should be!

Disclosure aside, I believe at the core of the reputation problem the SEO industry has, is the common arrogance many SEOs have (myself included at times).  Arrogance isn’t a bad thing if you have the skills to back it up, but it commonly causes issues for both clients and SEOs that might end up as serious problems at a later date.

IMO, it is inevitable that the ASA (or another industry body) will clamp down on how the Internet marketing industry promotes its services.  Just as we can’t measure the environmental impact of certain promotional claims a new product will make, there are also many areas of SEO with similar levels of uncertainty.  It’s not about tying the hands of SEOs – it’s about clearing up grey areas as best as possible to avoid problems down the line.

What do you think?

Scott

1.  Submit your site to directories.

If you aren’t already doing this as part of your link building efforts, then directory submissions can be a quick and easy way to help with your SEO efforts.  As long as you train your staff member on the basics (following submission guidelines, varying anchor text) there’s not really anything that can go wrong.

Lists of directories to submit to can be found easily enough via search engines.

2.  Participate on forums

Don’t do this simply for link building – that can lead to a world of pain.  Just look at the negative publicity Jobsite got after spamming one of my forums!

But good, solid community participation can be a great way to gain exposure for your business and brand name, while at the same time helping a little with link building from your signature links.

The aim should be to build the reputation of your company, and not simply to whore yourself for links.  Don’t drop links in posts unless they are relevant – try to offer advice to offers where appropriate and generally conduct yourself as if you were attending a networking event.

Added bonus – any forums that display thread view counts can be a great way to find new keywords to target!  Unusually large thread view counts can suggest that the thread is receiving a lot of traffic from somewhere (and not just the normal forum browsing traffic).

3.  Contribute to the company blog

Even the opinions and thoughts of a junior member of staff can make an interesting read and can also be a good part of their training.  You will need to carefully focus your staff member’s efforts and not simply let them loose on your site, but done well and it can add valuable content to your blog.

4.  Monitor social networking sites / forums / competitors

If there are active communities within your niche, then it is worthwhile keeping up to date on what’s going on in them.  It might give you ideas for new features for your site, or new markets to target.

While the forum participation is an active role within these areas, monitoring them is more of a passive activity – this is information gathering for internal use, rather than participation to improve the outward value of your company.

5.  Link request emails

I’m not a fan of this – it needs to be done right.  You really don’t want to spam other sites with automated link requests – that’s bad for your reputation.  However, sending a few select link requests can be considered a more public relations role – you build a relationship with the site, not just try to get something from them.

For example, getting in touch with local newspapers for a link can lead to conversations about your business and possibly some free exposure.  Treat your link requests in this manner.

6.  Competitor SEO analysis

Scrape their keywords (grab them from title tags) and do some keyword research on what you find.  Are you missing out on some juicy keyword markets?

Ditto for backlink counts – are you missing some nice link sources?  You can usually forget all the directories and crap like that, but finding news site links on the back of some exposure can give your marketing team some ideas that will eventually help with SEO.

7.  Social networking

Get your staff registering accounts with the likes of Linkedin and so on.  Set up a company Facebook account – perhaps advertise them via any forums you participate on.  Over time this will build up a nice portfolio of contacts.

8.  Rankings analysis

Do you have any rankings bringing in traffic that aren’t number 1?  Then perhaps these are worth attention – perhaps your on page optimisation isn’t quite geared towards that term – perhaps some deep links will do the trick!

9.  Find online marketing opportunities

Small sites offering banner advertising or larger sites offering newsletter sponsorship – these are great ways to expand your marketing activities.  A staff member with some time on their hands can easily compile a master list of sites with advertising options for you to look at later on.

———–

I might update this list at a later date (feel free to comment with any suggestions).  The key here is that all this stuff doesn’t require much experience to do well – it’s all about common sense (with a little guidance from more senior staff where appropriate).  It’s good for your staff to be getting involved as well – particularly junior staff.  Just doing this stuff will not only benefit the company, but will help new staff familiarise themselves with your industry more quickly than the usual training manuals, etc.

I’ve chipped in my 2c from time to time on the recent discussions, but having read back even a week or two I see small businesses being advised to do some pretty ridiculous stuff.  Its nuts – people are being advised by “experts” to churn out thousands of pages (one per town) just to target different locations. 

I can see the logic from a marketing point of view – conducting local campaigns offline requires location specific targeting – fair enough.  But do we really need mom n’ pop sites creating what are essentially doorway pages to target local areas?  That’s just going to lead to a world of pain for them.

I wrote an article on optimising for local terms a while back and I generally point people to that – I think that’s a pretty good start for small businesses to begin with as it doesn’t directly lead the less savvy to the conclusion that they need to churn out loads of content to target loads of local terms.

That’s the key IMO – keeping the less savvy tamed so they don’t run off and do something silly (which is perhaps one of the most common causes of SEO problems for small businesses – DIY SEO gone awry)…

• Tell people they need keywords on the page – that can lead to keyword stuffing or hidden text.
• Tell people they need different pages to target different keywords – that can lead to doorway pages or crap content pages.

We need to educate our market – but we need to educate responsibly

The amount of rubbish that is being sold as “fact” around the SEO world is becoming ridiculous.  Just in the past week I’ve seen the following “facts” being posted on forums by people offering professional SEO services:

1. Big directories aren’t well optimised – they just rank well because of their homepage PR.
2. Directories are well optimised – you need to add more keywords to your page to compete.
3. Keyword domains rank better than non keyword domains.
4. Just get deep links to compete with larger sites targeting local areas.
5. The more pages you have the more keywords you can target.  I have thousands of pages for (mid competitive key term) one for each town in the UK.

OK, these aren’t necessarily bad statements – but taken in context they can be very dangerous for small businesses.

These statements are made by low experience SEOs probably based on some mild success they’ve had.  Fair enough – but in most cases the advice is grossly inappropriate for the situation – the SEOs simply don’t have a sufficient understanding of how search works to be able to give out solid advice…

1. Yeh, big directories may have a strong homepage PR – that doesn’t necessarily mean that all their local rankings are a consequence of that.  Sending out this message to a small business will only result on them embarking on a quest for PR which would be a fools errand and potentially risky (if they start messing with paid links, cross linking sites, hording PR and so on).
2. Yeh, some directories may be well optimised but telling a small business site to add more keywords to their page is plain stupid.  There’s a sweet spot to hit with on page optimisation and if you don’t make that clear to small businesses they WILL take it to extremes.
3. Yeh, keyword domains may rank better than non keyword domains – that’s just down to people linking to them using the site name (keywords).  Sending out this message will see small businesses sacrificing branding and reputation for keyword domains which is crazy talk.
4. Yeh, deep links can help certain campaigns but they aren’t a prerequisite for success and IMO are entirely unnecessary for UK local campaigns (with the exceptions being high population areas or high £££ markets).  Why send small businesses out looking for deep links when solid on page optimisation and decent homepage link building will suffice in most cases?  This one particularly annoys me as I see “deep linking” being presented as a solution for poor site architecture or on page SEO all the time.
5. Yeh, the more pages you have, the more terms you can target.  But do you really want to have 1000 pages conveying a single message?  How much variation in content can you really achieve?  I don’t care how superb your copy is – if you have 1000 pages saying the same thing it is spam.  The guy suggesting this had his SEO site targeting obscure towns – the pages (optimised for SEO + town terms) had decent copy – but it was all irrelevant (non SEO) information like the population and history of the town.  How is that a good result?  And same problem again – 9 out of 10 small businesses won’t go to the lengths of writing decent copy on this level – it will just be regurgitated crap which ends up as a crap result for searchers.  See my article on SEO agency copywriting sins too!

The key problems:

• Inexperienced SEOs offering opinion as fact. 
• Inexperienced businesses taking SEO too far.

These are issues that really need to be addressed.  There was a time that almost 50% of my consultancy business came from fixing other peoples work – that is not a good state of affairs for our industry to be in.

The problem is that it is easy for anyone to build up credibility as a SEO on non SEO forums – there’s generally a similar level of SEO knowledge and experience on the forums and it’s not like the advice given out is bad – it’s more that the manner in which it’s given out is inappropriate.

Here’s my suggestion for a solution:

All you experienced SEOs out there – take the time every now and again to visit your preferred local / small business forums and help out answering a few questions.   It’s not like the noise factor on some SEO forums – small business owners are all usually very grateful and if we do it enough then perhaps we can undo some of the damage done by the less than reputable members of our industry.

And as for all you folks with less SEO experience - I’m not saying don’t help people out – all I’m saying is that we really do need to be careful how we give out advice.  Small businesses asking for advice are usually about to attempt some DIY SEO – the responsible thing to do is to ensure all the risks are outlined and that you really are confident that what you are saying is accurate (if not, just say so – that’s the right thing to do). 

Small business SEO advice is a very delicate process – it’s not like people are optimising a blog or Adsense site that they can chuck away if it goes wrong – in a lot of cases their business website is core to their living – you need to treat it with that level of respect, especially if you are selling yourself as an SEO professional.

Lastly, to all those non-SEOs-but-like-to-dish-out-advice-because-they-optimised-their-own-blog – stop it!  I don’t care if you got your poxy little site to number 1 for a competitive term – that doesn’t make you an SEO and it’s incredibly arrogant to assume you are qualified to hand out advice.  Yes, you!  The “SEO is easy” crowd.  I mean, seriously, I’ve seen professional printers advising small businesses reliant on their site to change their existing site to Wordpress because “they once optimised a blog and got some traffic”.  Just stop it.  Yes, you people who self-scored a 6 on the SEOmoz level of SEO professional test even though you’ve only ever optimised your own crappy little blog.  Stop it now!

Scott

 

Pretty neat huh?  I’m seeing the additional search box added to quite a few SERPs today – seems to be only for site names just now.  I know TheBestOf use the Google Search Appliance for internal searches and I also see the search box on results for Youtube, Amazon and a few other big names.

Searching using the additional search box simply carries out a Google search for the keywords + site:domain.com, rather than producing customised search results from the company using the the search appliance (which would have been cool).

What’s worrying is that it is a slight step onto the toes of webmasters here.

• Say someone searches for your company name and they get this secondary search box that prompts them to “search your site”.
• Say then they decide to search your site.
• How do you feel about them getting these results:

Yup, 10 nice local results in what is essentially a refined site: search.

Explain to me the relevancy of that for users please Google?  They search for a business by name and instead of serving the right information, Google prompts to refine the search and plasters in some more results from other sites.

I guess as a new feature it’s pretty cool, but you have to wonder if everyone will be happy about the potential use for this.  It’s all very well Google setting out on a mission to index the web, but surely there has been a line crossed when Google can potentially show results from your competitors when a Google user is…

1. Specifically searching for YOUR business…
2. Wanting to search YOUR site…

What do you think?  Would Search Engine Watch be happy if a user used their site search and was returned results from Sphinn? Hmmm.

Scott

I’ve worked with Dave and Paul Carruthers before and they both know their stuff – well worth a look at the job posting if you are looking for work just now.  Check their post here: Wanted = 1 Paid Search Executive

Scott

This new scheme looks pretty cool and seems to be somewhat of a competing service to Google’s Universal Search / Local Search / etc.  Check out the screenshot on the Y! blog – basically it means your Yahoo! search results could include more features and deep links to your site, including reviews, photos, contact details and price information.

From the Yahoo! blog:

Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners — big or small — an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

Not only is this an interesting (and pretty clever) move from Yahoo!, it also indicates a shift for the future of search and search engine optimisation.  I love the revised look for the Y! search results – I think this rolled out to the live SERPs would be a great change for Yahoo! and will most likely force the hand of MSN and Google who will need to keep up (although in fairness, Google has led the way in the past with new features like this).

It will take a bold step from any search engine to make the move from old school SERPs to new SERPs – Google have gone some of the way over the past year or two, but having been playing it relatively safe by keeping everything under the “beta banner”.

More doors opened though, means more ways for people to spam!  I know Google Local do keep a tight control of data that powers local results in listings – but that’s just a few big sites providing most of the information, with loads of small sites providing a small proportion of the listings.  By allowing webmasters to dictate so much data that will be reflected in live SERPs, Yahoo! could be setting themselves up for a lot of work to keep a solid level of quality control over the process. 

A lot of work?  Yes, but I do think it is entirely within the realms of any of the big search engines to manage this well – and I also really do think they should do it.  

For SEOs it could make for an interesting future.  More data to play with + more control over SERPs = great for us.  But think about it:  more data on page 1 = less people browsing to page 2 (or even to below the fold on page 1).  Where title tags influence click through rates now, user reviews, contact details and other supplementary information might influence CTR in the future.

Not a bad thing, but certainly may offer a larger challenge for the Internet marketing community.  What do you reckon?

Sign up for more information about the release here and WebmasterWorld discussion here.

Scott

(minor gripe – why do Yahoo! still have a link to Threadwatch on the blog roll?)