Utah Search Engine Optimization | SEO

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Rebecca Kelley, of SEOmoz, recently wrote a post on ShoeMoney.com entitled “How SEO is Like Guitar Hero”. The breadth of her post is an analogy of how learning SEO is like playing guitar hero for the first time. It seems extremely hard and overwhelming but the more you dive into it the better you get and the easier it seems. At that point, you advance to a whole new level and encounter the same thing all over again.

Figuring out the best way to learn SEO is hard. You don’t know where to begin, who to trust, where to look, what to believe, or how to begin. I’m going to highlight how I started and a few things I’ve learned along the road to hopefully help you decide how you want to begin.

At the very beginning I was working as a Web designer and when times were slow I was mentored by an SEO professional, Jason Miller of EngineReady, to help create landing pages for certain clients. In this process I learned the ins and outs of on-page optimization. It wasn’t until a few year later did I decide to further my education in search engine optimization.

Not knowing where to begin, I dove into the deep end of the pool swimming in an overload of information from blogs and podcasts that I found via search. The frustration I dealt with was that often times author’s information contradicted what I had just read a few articles before. I spent weeks absorbing all the information I could then began implementing and testing different strategies.

Before long, I was figuring out what worked, what didn’t work, who the authoritative authors were and who to ignore. From that point forward I’ve spent approximately 10-12 hours a week keeping up on industry news and blog publishing to keep my education current.

I wish there had been an easier way, I spent months and months reading stuff I didn’t have to, that wasn’t accurate, that was untested or just heard through the grapevine. Now days I’ve heard about people spending hundreds of dollars on e-books and thousands of dollars on training courses to learn SEO so Garrett Pierson and I came up with a cheaper solution.

We wanted to be mentors to new people starting out, like Jason Miller was to me, and help them along to learn SEO step-by-step. We wanted to make it affordable so they wouldn’t have to spend thousands on training courses, months of their time sifting through garbage and fallacies on the Web, or hundreds on redundant e-books that only TELL you what you need to do to improve rankings and not SHOW you how to do it.

What Garrett and I do is walk you through screencast videos where we show you exactly the process needed to optimize a site from scratch. This includes all the keyword research, competitive analysis, tool usage, trade secrets, etc. If you want to sign up for our launch date then check us out at Learn SEO Live. Only $19 a month forever if you sign up now!

Learning SEO the RIGHT Way

An important thing to note is that every Website is different. What works on one site may not work on another. What worked yesterday may not work or work as well today. So the best thing to do, after learning the basics, is to begin testing yourself. Sure it’ll be a baptism by fire and you’ll make mistakes along the way and come across a few roadblocks

Make sure you seek out the reputation on background of the professionals that share their experiences and testing with you. Test results will vary for each Website, but there is a lot to be learned from others that can save you some costly mistakes.

So a summary of the key takeaways are:

• Reading and Research
• Conduct Testing
• Get Professional Training

To get started: check out the teleseminar podcast with Garret Pierson talking about our background, SEO tips, and more.

There are many great people who make the Search Engine Optimization industry a great place. There are so many honorable mentions I’d feel guilty listing my allegiance to them in fear I’d leave someone out. From my perspective, there’s three individual SEO specialists who don’t get as much attention in the limelight as they deserve so this is my tribute to them. Let’s thank these fine gentleman for bringing many things to light with the power of blogging.

Bill Slawski of SEObytheSea.com - Although Bill is well-known throughout the SEO industry, I still don’t think he receives the credit he deserves. This man has an uncanny ability of decrypting insanely ambiguous search engine related patents and translating them into plain English in terms the average person can comprehend. Don’t get me wrong, Bill’s an All-Star, he’s spoken at many conferences and has his fan-base but in my eyes he’s the MVP of 2007.

Sebastian X of Sebastians-Pamphlets.com - Sebastian, a.k.a. Sebastian X, is also pretty well-known in the SEO industry but I also do not think he’s given the props he deserves. He has carved quite a niche for himself being the ultimate guru in the programming spectrum of SEO. He has a wide array of experience with Apache, PHP, MySQL which he utilizes to always think outside the box with. You won’t find content like his much elsewhere so I recommend you check out his blog.

Marios Alexandrou of AllThingsSEM.com - I am sure I’ve read Marios’s blog postings time and time again in the past, but just recently has his blog really caught my attention. What I love so much is his updated SEO Expirements. Sure, I’ll come across experimentation here and there and even conduct my own, but rarely do I see it reported so straight forwadly in it’s own category of a site. Marios recently had a story hit Sphinn.com homepage regarding a career in SEO being a bad move. I love his insightful opinions on different things. So definitely check him out.

The long tail, in reference to search engine optimization, is all the keywords and keyphrases that hold little traffic by themselves, typically longer 4-7 word phrases, but collectively add up to a large amount of traffic. Illustrated below is a diagram of the head and the long tail.

If you’ve ever ran a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, in your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts, for a popular keyword you can certainly appreciate what a drain on financial resources that can be. Especially, if you’re landing page content isn’t “sticky” and doesn’t provide optimal ROI with conversions. There is a much cheaper way of leveraging value of PPC campaigns while driving your organic search engine optimization (SEO) efforts full force. The trick of this trade is maximizing the long tail search terms for PPC and the head terms for SEO.
You’re probably wondering how you can find your what the long tail of your own Website is. There are a few tools out there for that. My favorite is HitTail. Through an external JavaScript placed on your Website, HitTail records all search queries coming to your site and separates the head from the tail. It shows you a diagram of the percentage of long tail visit vs the percentage of head visits. SearchtheWeb2 is a semantic search engine that clusters word phrases related to your search query via natural language processing. It clusters the popular keyphrases and the long tail keyphrases in a list for you to narrow down your search if desired. It’s great for seeing what kind of long tail phrases are related to certain keywords. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and Microsoft’s adCenter Lab Keyword Group Detection Tool are both really great to find semantically similar keywords that people might be searching for in their longtail queries. So bookmark these tools and revamp your search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies for maximum online profit.

Recently, Yahoo! and Google have both been adding new options to their search engine result pages (SERPs). These options include Google’s PlusBox and and Yahoo’s Quicklinks. Illustrated below is Google’s PlusBox for Walmart. They have a PlusBox for their stock quote that expands to give stock information. Along with that, they have category or sub-page links within their site. Google typically does this for strong authorative Websites with a high amount of Trust Rank.

Another example below shows Google’s PlusBox being used for localized search. They have a PlusBox that shows the localized listing in the SERPs with their map, address, and phone number. You don’t have to be an extreme authority to have a PlusBox with this type of localized integration.

Yahoo’s Quick Links are similar to Google showing subpages for authorative sites. However, Yahoo! will also be charging for these Quick Links if you’re a site that doesn’t get them naturally. The think I like better about these Quick Links in the search engine result pages is that they are inline horizontally. Thus, they take up less room.

Good or Bad Usability Practices?

In my opinion, I think Google and Yahoo! are getting out of hand with their SERPs. I firmly believe in allowing the Websites, authorative or not, to display their prominent content to the user (i.e. stock quotes, maps, sub pages, shopping categories, etc.). It is a search engine’s job to display quality and relevant results to queries, but it is not the search engines job to display a site’s content to the user.

When you have more options on a Webpage you have more:

• Distraction
• Noise
• Thinking
• Load Time
• Code
• Images
• Bandwidth (a problem for mobile search)

I think Google became the most popular search engine not by their results but by their simplistic user interface and good usability. Both Yahoo! and MSN have searches integrated into their news pages whereas Google has just had a single standalone search box.

I’m sure I stand alone on this because I’m sure Google and Yahoo! both held extensive case studies, focus groups, stakeholder research, and testing before putting this into motion. I guess they know what they’re doing, but I’m annoyed by it. Sometimes less is more, right?

The way SEOs conduct search engine optimization is changing all the time. The future of a large portion of search engine optimization is really just good usability, accessibility, development, design, information architecture, and marketing. All those measures are going to lead to one thing: developing a quality site that gets users to visit, read, bookmark, act, and come back for more.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will start observing how users behave on your Website to add to a hidden trust rank score, similar to a page rank score. Google already has the tools in place to observe this data through Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Analytics, and sites that have registered XML sitemaps with their Google accounts. With these kind of tools Google can measure how many people visit your site, what pages they land on, how long they stay, what they click on, what they book mark, form submissions, etc. This data is invaluable in calculating the authorative value and trustability of a Website. Once this information is collected it can be used in their algorithm to give further trust rank to Websites and thus boost their SERPs.

There are two approaches to this for whatever hat you wear. Whitehat SEOs will have to make better quality sites and focus on user retention and driving calls to action. Blackhat SEOs will figure out some methodology of fake user-surfing emulation. Either way, it’s time to start preparing for the inevitable.

Google’s changing the game of search engine optimization with their recent release of OneBox. Google OneBox appears at the top of results whenever a popular [city] phrase is combined with a popular search query. For example: [Salt Lake City internet marketing] returns the following results.

How does this changes the game of SEO?

Well not only do you have to aim for top organic search results, but now you have a new algorithm in place to rank on local results such as Google’s OneBox. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have always had local search but Google has been the first to implement theirs into the regular search results as well.

What can you do to optimize for local search?

• Social Local Search - Submit your company’s listing to some of the top social local search sites. This article states social local search is up 44% in the past 12 months. Yelp, InsiderPages, CitySquares, Judy’s Book, and Mojo Pages are good examples of these.
• Internet Yellow Pages - SuperPages, Yellowbook, InfoSpace, SwitchBoard are also good examples of these.
• Local Search Engines - Submit your site to Google Local, Yahoo! Local, ASK, MSN Local, and TrueLocal.
• Data Providers – Acxiom, GeoSign, and InfoUSA are two major powerhouses for supplying local search databases. Submit your company listings to these sites as well.
• Contact information – Have a dominant address and phone number on your contact page and at least one other page, preferably the homepage. This information builds trust rank value in your Website as well.
• Microformats – Microformats are an open format for data specification. hCard’s represent data about people and specifications. Visit microformats.org to learn how you can incorporate hCard’s in to your Website. One more search engines catch on to microformats this will be quite revolutionary for Local Search.
• Meta data – Use geo meta data to tell search engines your location. Code detailed below:

<meta name=”geo.position” CONTENT=”latitude; longitude” />
<meta name =”geo.placename” CONTENT=”Place Name” />
<meta name =”geo.region” CONTENT=”Country Subdivision Code” />

Does social media ever slow down? YouTube has announced they are releasing a mobile Website in June of this year (2007). Some mobile phones are currently able to view a demo they have. So add http://m.youtube.com to your bookmarks because it will be here shortly.

Yahoo! just recently released a mobile search services called oneSearch. This is their attempt to compete with Google’s mobile search and a fine attempt it is. Illustrated below is a comparison of the two mobile searches side by side.

I think it’s going to become universal in a URL if you spot a stand-alone “m” then it most likely has something to do with mobile search.

How does mobile search engine optimization differ from traditional SEO?

Typically, conduct your SEO the same as you’ve always done, but there are a few extra measures to take to be indexed and ranked better on mobile meta search engines, and to have your site actually view correctly on mobile devices.

• Validate your code and separate design from content.
  XHTML and CSS compliant code is important because mobile devices aren’t as forgiving as browsers are.
• Take advantage of the power of CSS.
  Not only will a tabless CSS layout lower your load time, which is important to mobile users being charged per byte used, but you can also specify a separate stylesheet for mobile devices using the “handheld” attribute. Remember the key is to separate content from design.
• Make a mobile sitemap.
  Use Google’s mobile sitemap generator to generate a mobile sitemap . See section 2b for information on the mobile configuration of your XML file. When you’re done you can submit it to Google Sitemaps that is currently in beta.

Off the topic of search, but something I’d like to show you, is MobiTV. I haven’t had a chance to check this out because I don’t have a compliant wireless service, but you can get TV on your mobile phone. I would like to hear about someone’s experience with this.

Personalization has been creating a lot of hype in the Utah search engine optimization scene lately. Personalization has been implemented into the results of Google accounts that are signed in for quite some time now. Google collects your search history and displays results based off of what you’ve searched for and clicked on in the past. Many search engine marketers and optimizers have been reluctant to Google pushing this mainstream. Reason being is that it makes the game of SEO a lot harder when everyone has a different set of results.

Matt Cutts, Google’s spam king, claims that it will be tough times for black hat SEO artists because SEOs will have to focus more on users and less on algorithm reverse engineering. I was curious to what black hats were thinking so I cruised over to SEO Black Hat and found this post. Apparently, they are excited about personalized search and view it as a great thing. Additionally, nobody posted any comments about how this might affect their jobs as blackhat SEOs.

I don’t think there’s going to be too much to worry about for SEOs. Google Bookmarks are going to have a huge impact on people’s results. With that said, I see social bookmarking campaigns being just as big, if not bigger, than link building campaigns.

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google, said that personalized results only show up in about one of every five searches, and would only lift two results into the top 10, never replacing the number one organic result.

There are many caveats I want to address with personalization. The top result is typically the most visited result for any search query. If the top result never changes then that’s not really much personalization now is it? If you’re someone who typically uses the “I’m feeling lucky” button in Google then you’ll always get the same result whether you’re signed into Google or not. Also, everything you click on gets ranked higher in your personalized results. How does Google determine if you liked what you clicked on or not? That’s a major flaw in this system right now.

Another issue is the latency involved with temporary search patterns and localization. What if you’re on vacation for two weeks in New York and you’re searching for local restaurants, hotels, clubs, etc. When you return home your results are going to be skewed towards New York. How long will it take to recognize you’re not searching for New York based businesses anymore when you return home to Utah or wherever? What if your kids hop on your computer to search for something like kids games? The next time you search for games online your results will be tainted.

Personally, I’d like to see Google more focused on semantic mapping and clustering of search terms while it refines personalization. They already have started implementing this feature for select search phrases, but I think they need to push it a bit more. I think Clusty.com and Quintura.com have both done a good job of semantic clustering.

Link building is the most important element in high search engine rankings. Search engines count links to your site as a popularity vote. Search engines have grown smarter in recognizing link patterns, linking profiles, deep-linking, one-way and reciprocal linking strategies, etc.

Your links should be inbound one-way links with appropriate anchor text related to your site. They should also come from a site that’s related to the theme and content of your Website, or the link will be devalued. Who you link to matters as well. If your site links out to link farms (sites that’s only purpose is to host a large array of spam links) then you could be penalized for it.

Benefits of link building

Like I’ve said before, if content is king then link building is queen. I’m actually quite convinced that links are king. I’ve seen contentless (is that a word?) sites rank well just based off their link. Consider a link a vote in popularity. They key thing to remember is it’s not about the quantity it’s about the quality. Quality links alone can make your site rank well for your search terms without doing much else.

Consider the Google bomb of ‘Miserable Failure’. For years, up until just recently when Google finally assessed this matter, if you were to type ‘Miserable Failure’ into Google the first page that would come up is Bush’s page on whitehouse.gov. Nowhere on that site does it even mention ‘Miserable Failure’ but some pranksters linked to that site using the anchor text of ‘Miserable Failure’. Sure enough, whitehouse.gov was #1 for that term. Google has started catching on to this method of Google bombing, or mass-linking the exact same anchor text from a large number of multiple sites. This is why it’s important to vary your anchor text of your keywords and keyphrases when getting links from other sites.

Link Building Strategies

Reciprocal linking is pretty much a dying practice, but people still do it and some still swear by it. To do reciprocal linking what you should do is create a page on your site as a directory page to swap links with others. I would refrain from naming it “links” or something that search engines might catch onto really easily. Search engines don’t really condone reciprocal linking, but if you must then read on. You’re probably better off naming it “affiliates” or something similar. On your affiliate page create a directory of sites you’ve traded links with. You must make sure these sites are related to your niche or theme of your Website. Trading links with non-related sites is absolutely worthless. Linking to banned sites or link farms will hurt your TrustRank with Google as well.

To trade links with a Website look for a “links” or “affiliates” page on their Website. Sometimes they will have instructions on their site like how to link to them. Other times, you should just e-mail the Webmaster or owner directly in a professional manner. Do not use an automated program to find links and email the owners. These have a very low return rate of response. Be sure to have linked to them already before e-mailing them regarding a link exchange, and show them exactly where their link is.

To find your competition’s links go to Yahoo.com and type linkdomain:competition.com. All of their backlinks will show. You can then go through these and see what you have to do to get links from some of their best sources.

There are a few good directories to get links from and the rest are pretty much worthless unless they are related to your niche. Some of the better link directories are quite costly. I will share directories in a later post but for now know that directories like DMOZ (free), Yahoo!, Best of the Web, Business.com, and bCentral (currently not accepting new people) are quality directories to stick to. Other directories are generally link farms, and some even require reciprocation. I would highly suggest not doing that and I will explain why in the next section.

Link bait is an overused term basically meaning to offer something that people will want to link to naturally. Some common things to link bait with are informative articles, widgets, web applications, tools, or anything to lure someone in to your site. If others see it as beneficiary to them, then they will link to your site naturally. Informative articles can be bookmarked on social bookmarking or social news sites and spread like wildfire. If you land your article on the front page of Digg you can expect a surge of server-crashing traffic.

Purchasing links…too risky. But if you must, then be very careful about doing so.

Press releases are a great way to get exposure. PRweb.com and PRleap.com are great sites that distribute your press release to many news aggregators including Google. Not only do you get great exposure of your breaking news, but you get tons of incoming one-way links that you put in your press release.

Articles are similar to press release in the sense that you can mass-distribute them to article Web sites and reap the benefit of a large amount of backlinks.

*NOTE: Before submitting any press releases or articles, be sure you post them on your site and let them get indexed first. It’d be a shame to submit your content to someone else and they get the original creator credit for it. If that were to happen you would trigger a duplicate content penalty for hosting the material on your site.

.EDU and .GOV links are the best kind of links to get, not because of their domain extension, but because they are considered great authorities and are have good trust rank. Typically .EDU/.GOV sites have a huge amount of authorative links going to them from other trusted sites. They have great content and only link out to other trusted domains.

The Rate of Inbound links is very important. If your site is new then chances are you’re not going to get a hundred links in one day, and none for the rest of that week. These kinds of patterns set of flags to search engines. Be sure to keep your link profile consistent to avoid appearing like you’re spamming.

Quality not Quantity

Like I mentioned before, it’s all about the quality of the link. The quality of a link is determined by who links to you and how they link to you. Someone that links to you should be related to your site’s theme or niche market. You want to look for several things such as:

• Is there site listed in search engines?
• Do they have a robots.txt file blocking their link page?
• Do they use “NoFollow” on their links?
• Is their meta data telling search engines not to crawl links on that page or cache that page?
• Is their page full of hundreds of other links?
• Do they have a low page rank value?

If you answered “YES” to any of these questions then they most likely aren’t worth getting links from. However, getting links from only high page ranked sites looks unnatural to search engines in your SEO efforts. You want a wide array of page rank values linking to you, but the higher the page rank the better the value in some cases.

You want to get links from sites that:

· Rank well in their own search terms

· Have high traffic volume

· Have good PageRank value

· Have good usability, accessibility, and information architecture

· Are relative to your theme

· Are informative and useful

Some people worry about leaking PageRank when linking so they either refrain from linking or use “NoFollow” techniques. I think that by practicing these methods you endanger the usability and friendliness of your site. PageRank doesn’t hold much value like it used to, and others won’t favor your site if you don’t credit links so my suggestion would be to link freely. My guess is that these are probably factors when Google is determining TrustRank.

The Web 2.0, term coined by O’Reilly publishing, is pretty broad. It ranges from the new wave of web design trends including liquid layouts, to Web development application services that act as desktop applications often using Ajax, to social media and user-controlled content, and so forth. I want to focus not on the design or development aspects of Web 2.0, but the social media and user-controlled content aspect of it.

Some of the most visited sites on the Web are part of the new Web 2.0 era. These sites include: MySpace, Squidoo, Digg, Delicious, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc. These social Websites are covered in many various categories including: social search engines, multimedia related sites, blogs, bookmarking, social networking, news, podcasts, and more.

The benefits of social media marketing are great. You can get great backlinks to your sites, expose your name and branding, rank your social sites for keywords, and network with other people with similar interests or are in a similar niche market. To capitalize on social media you should first begin by creating accounts on my list of the top 10 social media sites. Afterwards, begin to participate in the social communities and build an authoritive profile for yourself. Once again, be sure to network with others that share similar interests or niche markets, and then link to and promote your own content or business in a non-spammy way.

1. Digg
2. Del.icio.us
3. Wikipedia
4. Flickr
5. Reddit
6. StumbleUpon
7. Technorati
8. MySpace