SEOGoddess

Why the Google Changes? Ooh Ooh - I get it!

2011-10-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

Stripping out "+" in searches and not providing keyword referrals in analytics
Last week I posted about Google's announcement to stop reporting on referring key terms in Analytics, and I have been keeping up to date as much as I can with all the news around it since then.

2 Days ago Barry Schwartz posted an article to SEL about the changes in how we search on Google. Google has removed the ability to use the "+" in our advanced search.

Google themselves said:
"We're streamlining the ways you can tell Google to search for the exact keywords you type, whether it's an exact phrase or a single word, by focusing on the functionality of the quotation marks operator. So, if in the past you would have searched for [magazine +latina], you should now search for [magazine "latina"] to get the same results."

So it hit me this morning...

Since the launch of Google+ several months ago, I have at times found it difficult to search for "Google+" or even the "+1 button". I am sure that since the launch, Google themselves are having trouble seeing referring key terms. In the past the referring URL would have "+" in between the terms. So if someone searched "Google+" then the referring URL would strip out the "+" and those monitoring the referring terms for Google+ would just see "Google" as the referring term. So their question would be: Did people search "Google" or "Google+"?

With Google+ itself being under a microscope after the dying "Google Wave" and "Google Buzz" I can see someone saying to the powers that be that this needed to get fixed. Otherwise they couldn't accurately decide if Google+ is going to succeed.

The next step in this process is to strip the referring URLs of their "+" in between key terms. This unfortunately directly affects analytics as companies won't be able to accurately see referring search terms anymore.

So now Google just needs to fix the tracking of referring terms somehow. Google doesn't want to miss out on that data any more than we do. So be patient, it will come back again...

SEO/SEM Salary Survey

2011-10-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

In July of 2008 I posted to this very blog a survey to gather a list of SEO's and their salary range with the promise of sharing out the results to everyone. I received well over 1000 submissions I posted the results and sent everyone an email with the data so they could form their own reports. While my results were posted in 2009 it was the height of the SEO and PPC employment boom, and Social Media was still a glimmer in our eyes.
So in the nature of updating data and keeping up with this every changing industry I decided that it is time to do the survey again, and see where we have gone over the past few years.

If you are an SEO or SEM take a moment and fill out the survey below. Also - feel free to add it to your own blog, send it to your friends to fill it out, etc. I promise to once again share the data with you all (minus emails to refrain from exposing you all to spam) in an excel doc, and post the results I have found from the folks that fill out the form.

Once we hit 1,000 or more submissions check your email for your attachment...

Add the survey to your blog or website:

Google Secure Search and what it means for SEO's

2011-10-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

I was editing videos from Search and Social Hawaii diligently and getting ready for my talk on SEO this Thursday when I saw a post update from the Google Analytics Blog addressing the announcement that Google is going to make search more secure. So I came out of my hole for a moment to draft up a quick blog post to clear up any questions.

Google says:

"As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users. Over the next few weeks, many of you will find yourselves redirected to https://www.google.com (note the extra “s”) when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page. This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe. You can also navigate tohttps://www.google.com directly if you’re signed out or if you don’t have a Google Account."

What does this mean for SEO's?

Rankings:
It doesn't directly effect rankings as a whole, but it does effect the individual user's results as they will see a more personalized list of websites in their search results. In all honesty, that doesn't change anymore than what us SEO's have been working towards for several years now since Google setup Gmail and a login feature for their products and searches. It just means that instead of a few users seeing personalized results, more users will start to see personalized results. So dont' focus on whether or not your target audience is going to be logged in and what they might see in their personalized results, assume that all of them are.

Analytics:
Now here's where it gets tricky. The Google Analytics team is working very closely with the rest of the company to ensure that data is being passed showing the referring URL and Terms from paid and natural search results.

"How will this change impact Google Analytics users?
When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google "cpc"."

What is Google Analytics doing about it?
We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more.

Which is great for those of you that have Google Analytics installed on their websites, but what about Omniture or Webtrends?
In 2005 when I was working with Omniture to start showing referring key terms for SEO and streamlining our PPC within the system they were able to crack the code and get us the robust tracking we see today. While I don't see a blog post on either Omniture, or Webtrands blogs (I'll add the links in a comment as soon as I see something) I can assure you that Google doesn't want to hide anything from us SEO's and Marketers. They want us to be able to see the referring traffic and asses what is working, and what isn't. If we don't see it, we can't create a better user experience, and that would go against all of Google's ideals.

For those of you that rely solely on Omniture (or have clients that do) take a moment and reconsider adding the Google Analytic tracking onto the website (or talk to your clients about it) for the time being.

So never fear, rankings will still go on as usual, and the ability to track in Google Analytics won't be effected in any way...

Carry on...

My New Job!

2011-09-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

Wait... What?
I started Wappow! nearly 2 years ago with the idea of a conference in Hawaii that was like no other in our industry. Upon signing the documents I had left my last full time position regretfully to work on this new venture 100% of the time. Thanks to the love and support (financial and emotional - and boy did I need the emotional support) from my husband I have taken what was once a spark of an idea in my head and turned into a full fledged company complete with conferences, workshops, the valued Social Day! and more online resources for marketers than you can shake a fist at. phew...
Of course as all entrepreneurs know and come to accept, the first years of a growing company are not the most financially secure. So while Wappow! has been growing and we are continuing to manage to stay in the black and debt free, my family needs Mom to step up and start helping out. As some of you know I have been looking for positions with some really amazing companies. The folks I have interviewed with are impressive marketers and have turned into loyal attendees, supporters, and close friends (despite turning me down for a position).
Enter Ian Lurie
Ian is one of the few people I genuinely respect and admire. He has become a friend that mutually shares this respect and has continued to support Wappow! through thick and thin. Ian shares the same ideals, goals, coupled with the desire to educate and mold the up and coming professionals in our industry into deep thinkers and passionate marketing individuals. Ian and his Portent staff have spoken at a number of our workshops and our conferences including Elizabeth Marsten, Aaron Kronis, Doug Antkowaik, and some new blood we will be shortly introducing.
So naturally as I reach my burnout moment with interviews and the Wappow! workshops I expressed my frustrations with Ian and asked (more like begged) him to consider me as one of his lucky staff at Portent Interactive. Ian responded with a big huge gigantic "YES" and after interviewing with the folks I will be working with on a regular basis I was sent over a contract to work a company who's founder I admire, staff I respect, and rapid growth I am humbled to be a part of.
My First Day
It has been a year since I have awoken to an alarm clock early in the morning with a timeline to get my butt in a shower, and drive to an office with people I am forced to be social with. My most recent days have consisted of waking up whenever, strolling to the couch, turning the TV on and watching Bravo marathons of the Real Housewives while I coordinate the next event for Wappow! Then come up with creative ways to market those events and build a brand with no money.

So I rolled out of bed this morning and directly into the shower. After which I wrapped the towel around me and proceeded to start my coffee (espresso, not that drip coffee %^$) and cleaned the kitchen (still in my towel). I said goodbye to my pooches for the afternoon (I swear Chuey was crying), locked up the house and drove into work (Notice I didn't stop atStarbucks? See, I'm still being thrifty).

I arrived at the Portent office 20 minutes early and with my phone dinging from incoming emails to Wappow! I took a moment to answer questions and coordinate with the hotel for Search and Social Hawaii before I walked in.
I walked through the doors and Elizabeth immediately hobbled (torn ACL) over to get me settled. They had a computer setup for me while we wait for my laptop to arrive from Dell (they say 2 weeks), a schedule of stuff to do for the next 2 days, and paperwork for me to read through. I have never in all my positions held (large or small companies) seen a company so organized and prepared for a new hire to immediately get started. Seriously - how many of you have sat around twiddling your thumbs your first few days?
With my day full of stuff to do and not one major hitch in getting me going I felt right at home.
Oh the Fun
As some of my closest friends know, I tend to be a bit of a practical joker, and at times just a really good comedian (well maybe a mediocre one), and while many of my past co-workers and especially bosses, may not have approved or appreciated it, I have to say Portentites took right to it.
I finished off my day with an introduction email to the entire company that Tracy (the COO, and my official Boss) decided not to ask me about myself and proceeded to make sh*# up. Really - he made it up, I swear.
His email:

Everyone welcome Jenn!
Jenn Mathews
Extension: 102

Things you might want to know about her that may or may not be true:

She is a Sea Fair Pirate.
Likes getting caught in the rain and Pina Coladas.
Has seen Twilight 15 times and believes that Vampires can walk in the daylight.
She can do the moonwalk forward, backward and to the side.
Here's a link to her website: http://portent.co/qj9wEA

Yeah - he really wrote that...
My response:

Just want to make one thing clear - Vampires CAN in fact walk in the daylight.

Which then sparked a long thread with multiple responses including: sarcastic comebacks, pics I cannot divulge to the public, and snickering that cut an otherwise busily quiet office. Even Aaron Kronis chimed in from New York...

My Takeaway
Because in every corporate setting you always have to have a takeaway. (yes, Portent is corporate - shut up Ian)
My first day takeaway is this:
What started out as a position that I held in high regard, have the highest of hopes for, and for which I could not sleep the night before from anticipated excitement: I have found my place amongst like minded talented individuals that know how to work hard and appreciate a good break in the day. The camaraderie is prevalent and the respect and admiration for a man I have personally come to respect and admire shows a lot about not only the company, but the people that make that company what it is.

Onward...

3 Simple Facebook Tricks for Marketers

2011-05-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

A lot of people ask me often "How did you do that?" in regards to some of the cool things I do with Facebook status updates, managing my pages, and so on. So here's a few of my little tricks you can use while marketing to your peeps.

1) Tagging in a Status Update or Comment
Tagging people or pages in Facebook is a common occurrence, but unfortunately a lot of people don't quite know how to do it, or how to use it to their marketing benefit. Adding a tag to an update can have many benefits. Thankfully, Facebook has recognized this downside to the secrets of tagging and has now made it easier to do by simply listing out people or pages you have "like"d to make it easier, but in some cases you may not see the suggestions pop up. In this case, you cans till use the "@" for tagging. One of the glitches is that at times it takes a bit for the system to populate the suggestions, so if you don't see them right away just delete everything back tot he "@" and redo it until it shows up. Also, if you aren't friends with the person, or "like" the page of the place or business you are tagging you won't see it in your suggestions. So be sure to "friend" or "like" them before tagging.
Here's how you do it:
Begin posting your status and simply add the "@" then immediately type in the name or page (no space after the "@" is typed) and you can see the suggestions pop up.

Using Tagging for Marketing
In some cases the status or post you made will show up on the person, business, or place's wall you tagged. If the person, place or business set their preferences to not allow people to tag them, or the page settings only show their posts to the wall, then your tag will not show up. It is still a good practice to tag when mentioning them though as it provides a link to their profile or page. Wappow uses tagging as we mention businesses that sponsor our events. The users can just click to their page and "like" them or just learn more about our sponsors. We also use this method for our speakers so our attendees can see who is speaking and learn a bit more about them by checking out their profile on Facebook. Some other uses are if you are offering a promotion with a partner company, you can tag the other company to gain more exposure. Blog posts that mention companies can be posted to your profile with a tag to the company you are blogging about. You can even call out your most active fans to show them appreciation for spreading the word about your company and encourage more brand advocates as others see you giving credit for active marketing on your behalf. Got more ideas? Comment below and tell me how you have used tagging to benefit your marketing.

2) Sharing Facebook URLs (Pages, Videos, and Photos)
The sharing of other Facebook photos, videos, or pages unfortunately isn't just a click away form the Facebook interface. At times you are given the option to "share" a post, or "like" a post or comment, but the post to your profile or page isn't as visible as it would be if you were to post them yourself.
For example: if you simply "like" something this is what it looks like in the stream:

The sample above is a comment on a video posted by a friend. As you can see it's pretty hidden amongst the other posts made. If it's a video or picture you really want your users to see and give credit to the person who originally posted it and you see the "share" option is available, got that route. Click the share link and a popup will appear with the option to make a comment and "share".

This is what it will look like if you "share":

Notice the video is much more prominent on the page than the comment.

If the "share" option isn't available, or you want to take full credit for sharing the photo or video, simply right click the link of the photo or video and select "copy link location". Then select the "link" on your page or profile and paste the link in the field and click "attach" - then comment away.

When sharing photos and videos from other sources (such as youtube.com, slideshare presentations, etc) simply grab the URL (link) of the item and paste it in the link field as shown above. In most cases Facebook recognizes the URL as a video or flash player and will render it on the wall as such so the user can just play from your stream. We use this for photo sets on Flickr, posting the link to the set directly to our wall so the user doesn't have to leave Facebook. Posting videos and photo set links to events before, during, and after is very beneficial to marketing efforts. People can see examples from the event and say they are "attending" or "maybe attending" which allows for us to continue to encourage them to register for the event and show up. In return your users will often share the videos or pictures which gives you more exposure and sparks the viral marketing effect.

Here's an example of what it looks like as your friends and fans comment, share, like, etc the item you posted:

Akvile had attended one of our events and commented on one of the pictures in photo album I had posted to the Wappow page. People that didn't make it to this particular event get to see who was there, who spoke (in this case Rand Fishkin CEO of SEOmoz) and will be thinking to themselves "Darn, I wish I had gone. I'll have to go next time." which for our monthly Wappow Social Day! is exactly what we want them to do.

3) Getting People to "Like" You

You've probably seen those ads or Facebook posts to groups or pages that say "Make money now on Facebook, get 'likes' for your page" or something similar. The truth is, there are no quick fixes to getting a ton of "like"s for your fan page. Sure you can pay some money to a company that will magically get you thousands of "like"s but what are they really going to get you? Nothing...

The best way I have found to getting "like"s is to be patient and know where your fan base is. You don't want thousands of random people that aren't going to benefit you by "like"ing your page, you want true brand evangelists that will buy your product, use your software, attend your event, will share out your content, and spark the viral effect (They "like" or comment, three friends see it and "like" or comment, and those people have three friends that see it, and so on.)

One of the most effective ways we have gotten "like"s with regards to business related pages is to add the like box to the website. After adding the SEOGoddess fan page to the SEOGoddess website I noticed a huge lift in "like"s to the page. Now the page has over 1,000 likes in just a few months, and the good news is: they are all people that took it upon themselves to "like" the page.

Add a "Like" Box to a Website

Adding a Like Box to your website is pretty simple - just grab the URL of the page you want to add, and go to the Facebook Developer's section and enter the URL of the page in the WYSIWYG they provide:

Click the "Get Code" button and copy the html code provided. You can then add the code to your website (or give it to your developer to add for you). If you have a Wordpress or other content management system, simply go into the source code or "edit html" option and paste the code where you want the widget to appear.

Don't Have a Website?

If you don't have a page that is associated with a website you can still get "like"s the natural way, it just might go a bit slower than you are wanting. Just remember, being patient is the key to quality "like"s. I created the Seattle, WA page on May 19, 2011 which now has 10 "like"s on it (1 week after it's creation) which are all very active in posting to the page and sharing posts. My initial strategy was to post to the Seattle, WA Group the page is associated with, shared it to my personal wall, and every couple of days share it to the SEOGoddess fans, Wappow fans, etc. I also scheduled posts to hit the page from Hootsuite with links to places to visit around Seattle, and events happening. As people catch on with posting events, businesses, etc the "like"s will grow and all will benefit from the page. How does this page benefit our marketing? Wappow hosts a lot of events in Seattle, WA so having a group just for Seattle, and a page that goes with it that both have a large following will eventually benefit the company gaining exposure to the event we hold. It also shows a sense of community on a personal level as Seattle is my home, my family history, and therefore very close to my heart. In a year or so as the company grows, the fan base will grow, and our branding in the local area will become strong resulting in people trusting in, and frequently attending our events.

So there you have it - 3 simple tricks you can do to get your Facebook marketing going. Don't forget to remember to engage with your friends and fans on Facebook and you'll be successful in driving leads and establishing a solid brand presence.

Social Media for a Cause

2011-05-20T13:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Gillian Muessig (President of SEOmoz and my SEOmom) asked me to do her a favor, and when SEOmom asks me to help her out, help her out I shall do.

She sent me a link to Chase Community Giving and described the charity she has been working with for a while now and is needing help in getting enough votes to get the much needed $25,000. The charity is called the "The Akshaya Patra Foundation" which is the world's largest NGO-run midday meal program, feeding 1.3 million children each day in over 8,000 schools through 18 kitchens in 8 states in India. Being a woman passionate about children and aiding people in other countries, I naturally took this one on. Not to mention that on 5/19 they where at 210 votes with 6 days to get to 200,000 votes we had a long ways to go. Gillian was at first discouraged, but I know if social media goes viral in the right ways anything is possible. So I immediately did the math - in order to get to 200k in 6 days if we could get at least 200 people (which is about where they where at to begin with) to each share to one person and ask that person to vote then we could double the amount of votes in 1 day. From there it's just a matter of getting each person that votes to encourage 5 friends to vote (or vote 5 times themselves and get one friend to share and vote 5 times) then day one should end with 2x what they started with. From there - if each person votes and shares to 5 people the viral effect should take hold and the numbers should grow to 250,000 by the 5th day.

Here's how it works:
Day 1 get to share to at least one friend - 200x2=400
Day 2 get those 400 to share to 5 friends - 400x5= 2,000
Day 3 get those 2000 people to share to 5 friends - 2,000x5= 10,000
Day 4 get those 10,000 people to share to 5 friends - 10,000x5=50,000
Day 5 get those 50,000 people to share to 5 friends - 50,000x5=250,000

So naturally by day 6 we should be well over the 200,000 votes...

How are we doing it you ask?
The beauty of marketing in social media for charities is that they are a charity. Asking people to vote for a person or a product is one thing, but asking them to give to help feed starving children, well it just tugs at the heart strings. Which is the driving success of any social media effort. It's not just about messaging, imagery, user experience, numbers, and any other traditional marketing strategy. It starts with emotion and social engagement first and then messaging, imagery, user experience, and numbers to drive the success.

So I started naturally started with a post to my Facebook status asking people to vote and share it out as well. The awesome thing too is that the page for the charity offers up ways to share it out and get people to vote (smart). A simple click to the Facebook like icon and I added a comment "This one is VERY important - we need 200,000 votes by May 25th. Help me spread the word by copying and pasting this and posting to your status..." But oops - I forgot the call to action to "vote", so while I shared it out, I didn't quite get the messaging right. What I should have said was "This one is VERY important - we need 200,000 votes by May 25th - go vote and then help me spread the word by copying and pasting this and posting to your status..." but then I didn't tug at the emotions of the people I am sharing to, so some of my friends thought it was spam (doh). So once again, I revised the post "Help us fight childhood hunger and promote education to the children in India. We need 200k votes by 5/25 to raise $25k - go vote and spread the word by copying and pasting this and posting to your status...".

From there I utilized some of the pages and groups I manage. The only thing is that the message and the nature of the charity didn't match up with the demographic of some of the pages. The "I had 'Learning Disabilities' as a kid and now I'm a genius" and the "Breakfast Sandwich" pages were both a prime example of where NOT to post a request to help a charity. The fans of those pages are looking for certain things, and starving children in India was not one of them. But I have others - and those pages (while not 100% the demographic we where looking for) could be worked into helping out. I refrained from using any of the Wappow business pages (the Wappow page, and the Social Day page are focused on marketing and social media marketing and to stray for even one post would discourage our fans), but the SEOGoddess fan page has a level of personality, and enough fans to make a difference, that twisting the message to work with the audience could actually grab some attention. So here's what I posted "President of SEOmoz, Gillian Muessig asked me to help her get votes for her favorite charity. I'm a sucker for helping to feed children in other countries so I voted... If you get a chance, go vote and get your friends to vote - we need 200k votes by 5/25 to raise $25k from Chase Community Giving." It ties in the SEO community by mentioning Gillian and the company she runs (in which SEOGoddess fans are also familiar with), and validates the post by mentioning what the charity does, and where the money is coming from. I also pulled in the sense of urgency and challenge (which sparks the competitive emotion in people) by mentioning the goal of getting 200k votes by 5/25. If you also notice, I validated why SEOGoddess is helping the charity herself (or myself as you look at it). By tagging Gillian, SEOmoz, and Chase it also puts the post on the walls of each of them (if they allow it in their settings) which validates each mention with a link to them, plus gets more exposure. Oh, and I didn't forget the 2 call to actions - 1) Go vote, and 2) Share with your friends.

But I didn't stop there...
I have a few strategies and tricks up my sleeve as a marketer. Asking friends to help share things out on a personal level goes a long way. I have found most times if I write out the message myself and send an email with an explanation as to why I am asking them, and why they should do it most times they are more than happy to help out. The trick is to email the people who's followers (and friends) are going to be the right demographic for the message. I wouldn't ask my Mother or Father to share this out (my Mom had a hard time even taking a cruise to Greece as it was just too foreign for her) so supporting children in another country isn't her thing. Not to mention her friends would think something is wrong with her. My Father is in Real Estate... (do I really need to explain why that demographic won't work?). So I selected a handful of friends in the SEO industry that know Gillian and SEOmoz well. I also hit a couple of friends that have been known to support charities similar to this one that aren't in the industry. So between Googletalk and Emails I managed to ask over 50 of my friends to help out. Each one came back with a "I'd be happy to"... It was because of the choice of demographic in friends, and their followers, and the personal messaging from me that encouraged them to say "yes". Now whether they message it right is up to them. I do at times have something to copy and paste, but a lot of times how I say something isn't necessarily the way they would say it so it doesn't quite come across right.
Of course there is still lot's more we can do - but at least we are off to a great start.
As of last night (after a full day of sharing) they where up to 260 votes (6:15 pm pst) and 690 this morning (6:30 am pst). As of now they are at 925 (1:35 pm pst) and growing each time I refresh the page. So according to the plan we should end with 2,000 today and continue to grow as each person votes each day (up to 5 times) and shares to 5 people who vote, and those 5 people share to 5 people who each vote and share and so on.

So when you get a chance today - go vote and share to at least 5 friends: http://wppw.me/4ZwVP
Don't forget to ask your friends to vote and share (and dont' forget to get your messaging in)...

Social Media, SEO, Starbucks, and the Breakfast Sandwich

2011-04-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

In January of 2008, I was gainfully employed with one of the many technology corporations based in Redmond, WA (No it wasn't Microsoft). It was Concur Technologies, an expense management software company (you've probably used them while booking your business trip and/or filed your expenses). As you know, while working at companies such as this, meetings are scheduled throughout the day (if not back-to-back) and in order for me to get a decent breakfast (well, almost decent) I would stop by my favorite Starbucks drive through and grab my Venti quad Vanilla Latte with 10 pumps of vanilla and a sausage breakfast sandwich. When I would get into work I would bring my coffee and breakfast sandwich into my first meeting of the day and eat happily as the meeting leads would hash out whatever it was they needed to hash out for the moment. My boss and my team got very used to seeing me every morning with my routine breakfast and they had all heard the story about how I had been grabbing my Starbucks coffee every morning since I could drive to school. As soon as the breakfast sandwiches were introduced I added them to my morning routine.

Starbucks announced it was discontinuing the breakfast sandwiches in the January 30, 2008 earnings call. Shortly after my Boss said casually as I opened up my white sack with "Jen" handwritten on it, "You know they're going to discontinue the breakfast sandwich, right?" My mouth dropped open and my heart skipped a couple of beats as a moment of panic struck me. The scream of "nooooo" was heard throughout the land and everyone in the room looked on in horror. I proceeded from meeting room to meeting room telling everyone how horrible it was that the breakfast sandwich was going to be discontinued. My Boss finally said, "With all the websites you have created, why not create one to save the breakfast sandwich?"
I headed home that evening and checked Network Solutions (the registrar and hosting company I have been using since my first website in 1999) to see if "savethebreakfastsandwich.com" or something similar was available for registration. Since it was available, I grabbed it, and set-up hosting for the website I was going to create. The marketing person in me began questioning "Why am I doing this?", "What is the sole purpose of the website?", "What is the ultimate goal?", and "What is the target market for the website?". Once I determined my marketing persona and strategy and my $0.00 budget, little effort marketing began.

Blog Comment

I posted a comment to the Starbucks Gossip Blog post titled "Starbucks to get rid of warm breakfast sandwiches" when the site was completed which resulted in a blog post dedicated to the 7 members we had in February 21, 2008. As a result of the comment and then blog post the site began generating a plethora of buzz around it.

Press and Buzz

February 29, 2008 - Seattle Time NWSource Blogger Amy Martinez wrote in Tidbits
"As of Thursday morning, 60 people had joined a Web site dedicated to saving Starbucks' warmed breakfast sandwiches, which the company plans to phase out this year.
One member of the newly launched http://www.savethebreakfastsandwich.com wrote "My homage to the Breakfast Sadwich (sic): Don't push me cuz I'm close to the edge, I'm tryin' not to lose my head, but it (sic) you take my sandwich away uh huh uh huh... " — MA"
May 15, 2008 - National Post "Starbucks Does Breakfast"
July 31, 2008 - Fresno Beehive Blog post "Starbucks introduces less stinky sandwiches"
"Starbucks recently announced it will begin making less smelly breakfast sandwiches.
First, some back story: In an effort to get back to its roots, the Starbucks CEO announced in January that the chain would stop carrying its hot breakfast sandwiches. Apparently the smell of baking (reheating?) bread, cheese and eggs overpowered the smell of coffee.
It was part of an effort to stay strong in a tough economy, with changes like closing local stores and laying off employees.
The folks at www.savethebreakfastsandwich.com mounted a mini rebellion, complete with posts like, "You can pry my peppered bacon, aged cheddar and egg from my cold, dead hands."
For whatever reason -- perhaps to fend off competitors like Dunkin' Donuts offering coffee and breakfast -- Starbucks reversed course. The breakfast sandwiches would stay. Only now, they'll be made with a new type of cheese (oh, I'm dying to know how they tested the smelliness of cheese) and less butter in the eggs to help control the smell."
September 5, 2008 - New York Times Executive Blogs post by Joe Nocera "The Starbucks Egg Sandwich Double-Cross"
"A few days later, I received an e-mail message from one of Mr. Varma’s (friend of writer and new employee of Starbucks) new colleagues, informing me that it wasn’t ineptitude that was keeping the sandwiches on the shelf — Mr. Schultz had decided to reverse his decision and keep them! "As you recall, Howard made a point that we would address the issues of quality and store experience as it related to breakfast sandwiches," she wrote. "We took a look at the sandwiches here in our Starbucks kitchens and were able to make improvements to the recipe to address the aroma and quality concerns. Bottom line — warm breakfast is an important complement to the daily coffee ritual of a significant portion of our customers and we think we have a win-win solution here."
The Starbucks woman also pointed me to a Web site called “Save The Breakfast Sandwich,” claiming that it showed there was a groundswell of customer support for them. But when I checked the Web site, I couldn’t help notice that it had all of 195 members."

We Got Traffic

Within the first month of the website launching the site received over 4,000 visits. I knew I couldn't rely on social media and the buzz of blogs to keep the traffic going at this rate, so I began optimizing for search engines creating a page for every city and state in the United States and optimizing for the key phrase "Starbucks in ...". 3 years to the date the site receives roughly 1200 visits in one month's time with 91% of the traffic coming from search engines.

Social Media

Now when this site was developed 3 years ago, Twitter was only a couple of years old, Facebook had opened it's doors to everyone just 2 years prior (September 26, 2006). What marketers used for "Social Media Marketing" back then was primarily MySpace, Linkedin, blogs, chat rooms, bookmarking sites, commenting on products, forums, list-serves, and the like. Not to mention that SEO was a "do some work and wait" type of job as Google's updates were happening every few months rather than every day as they are today. My social media marketing efforts were solely reliant upon bookmarking sites (adding the quick bookmarking links to each page of the website), blogs, press, and the general groundswell that online buzz marketing produced.

The Site Gets me a Job?

In November of 2009, I was working as VP of Interactive Marketing at Obvio.us.com and was looking to get back in-house with an established corporation again, when a Starbucks HR person posted to the Seattle Digital Eve list that they were looking for a Manager in Social Media. She specifically requested that all applicants put "digitaleve - manager - social media" in the subject line and send to her email address directly. I proceeded to update my resume to reflect the latest work I had done with clients, Concur, Classmates.com, Smartsheet, and mentioned the savethebreakfastsandwich.com website, the Facebook fan page, and talked about my checkins on Foursquare. Hoping to show how I not only support Starbucks, but also know the latest social media trends. Unfortunately I did not hear word back from her regarding the position. I have been told by numerous HR professionals that the market is (and was) flooded with individuals looking for work and resume's were being submitted by the hundreds of thousands making it extremely difficult for them to see every resume that crossed the system, email, or desk. Go figure...

It just goes to show you that creating a website that gets the attention of press, blogs, and all sorts of online sources will get you traffic, but unfortunately won't get you a job.

STBS Gets a Mention

On March 28, 2011 CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz spoke at a kick-off event for his new book "Onward" that shares the story of the company's turnaround revealing how Starbucks achieved profitability without "sacrificing humanity."

It was brought to my attention by one of Wappow's Search and Social Hawaii 2010 attendees Linda Sherman as she shared a link to the book on her Facebook wall. With the link she commented "I got so excited when Howard Schultz declared the importance of social media for any enterprise that I pulled out the only recording device I had with me at the moment - my iPhone 4." Naturally I had to respond with a plug for the savethebreakfastsandwich.com who's sole source of traffic is through social media and SEO. After she pointed out that the website is mentioned in his book, I quickly headed to Amazon.com and purchased both the Kindle and Hard Copy versions. Sure enough, on Page 231 it says "After I’d announced the end of the breakfast sandwich on the earnings call back in January 2008, we had immediately pulled the sandwiches out of stores’ display cases, although customers could still order them by request. And, as predicted, we saw an immediate decline in stores that had carried the product, but we also saw impassioned customer comments posted at MyStarbucksIdea.com and got them at our customer call center. A website even sprang up: Savethebreakfastsandwich.com.” Now here's where I point out that oddly the MyStarbucksIdea.com website was launched in March of 2008 and the only real comment that was made asking that Starbucks keeps the Breakfast Sandwich is my post by STBS (Save The Breakfast Sandwich) in June of 2008. Is this enough to warrant calling it an "impassioned customer comment"? or a plug to help boost a bad idea?

So?

So in the end, the website had caught the attention of some bloggers, press, breakfast sandwich fans, and even the CEO himself Howard Schultz all from social media marketing and SEO. Did the website truly save the breakfast sandwich at Starbucks? A question I will never truly be able to answer as no one from Starbucks has ever spoken with me (not about the site or for a position I directly applied for) - so it will forever remain a mystery.

Even after the website mention in the book and the traffic that the website is still getting from the individual city and state pages, I still pay every month to Network Solutions to host the website. I have now since revamped the site to reflect the saving of the sandwich and providing social interactivity that Facebook and Twitter allow us website developers to provide. I also set the Google maps to show all the Starbucks within each city and state on the according page so that the analytics stop showing a 99.8% bounce rate and a time of less than 1 minute spent on each page. Since the book mention and the changes that have been made, the site has seen a boost from 5% Direct Traffic referrals to 15% and from 3% referring websites to 8% with Facebook bringing in 3.5% of that traffic - though Google Organic is still bringing in a large amount of traffic all going to the individual location pages (roughly 60 keywords per day referring traffic from SEO to the individual pages).

I'm sure at some point Google will probably shut me down (or algorithm me out) as they punished JCPenney for buying links - according to the NY Times article "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search". Though I am hoping my "doorway pages" are user friendly enough that they will let them stay (especially since Starbucks doesn't offer maps with store locations for searchers).

The site is and has been used as a lesson in the effectiveness in social media and search engine optimization to the Wappow workshop attendees. I also do occasionally have an interviewer pull it up on their computer to show them what I am capable of when it comes to fooling around with silly little websites.

Facebook Like and Facebook Share

2011-03-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

As you may have noticed Facebook is popping up on sites all over the web. You can like, share, login, or even comment on blog posts, news articles, or any other page of a website. In typical Facebook fashion, developers used to be able to add either a "share" button or a "like" button to their website pages. The difference was that the like button was a simple click and notification that you "like" the page. There was no other effort on your part to write a comment, or anything else. The "share" allowed you to not only write a comment, but to edit the information (title, description, image) that was to be shared – giving the user a bit more control.Both would show up in the news stream, and on their wall, but the like was a simple line saying "Bob likes the blah page". The "share" showed up with a graphic, the comment, and the title and description of the page.

This allowed for more noticeability in the very busy news feed of the user’s friends. In most cases I would personally choose (and recommend) the "share" button.
And so did Facebook...
In recent developments Facebook has changed how the "like" button behaves making it more like the "share" button – allowing the user to "like" something, giving them the option to make a statement about it, and showing up more prominently in the news feed. So now when you setup your "like" button there are a couple of different options you can choose. 1) choose the word "recommend" or "like" in the button itself. 2) choose the layout style of Standard, Button Count, or Box Count.

So now when you "recommend" or "like" a page it gives you the option to say "what's on your mind?" adding a comment to the item in the news feed.

And instead of showing up in the news feed as "Bob like the Blah page" it now shows up more prominently with a graphic, title, and description.

Google is Finding more high-quality sites in search

2011-02-24T19:25:00.000-08:00

It's official - Google is focusing more on high quality websites and less on the fodder.

As Matt Cutts himself stated "This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."Official Google Blog: Finding more high-quality sites in search

Does this mean that us SEO's need to focus more on social media?
It's a trend I have been boasting about for several years now. With the indoncination of twitter several years back - while they may have added "nofollow" tage to all their links, I was still noticing a trend in rankings with our tweet blasts.

It was social media that has been driving the traffic to Wappow.com, and while search traffic has been picking up considerably the past few months as we reach our 1 year anniversary, I truly believe that social media is leading the way to those rankings.

The Internet and Beyond

2011-01-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

There are many aspects of society that are shared among all the diverse cultures in this world: love; food; friendships; and the Internet...

We have gone from a world separated by water, boats, planes, and cultures to a world now brought together by one common space. The internet has opened up possibilities that are endless - education, communication, and trade. I myself remember as a child our household was lucky enough to own an encyclopedia set my Mother had purchased on a payment plan. Most of my reports for school were completed easily at home with severalhours spent in the library looking things up in the Dewey Decimal System. My papers were hand written for draft #1, #2, and #3 and finally typed up on a typewriter. Today my 13 year old daughter plops herself in front of the computer, types in some key phrases and comes up with an abundant amount of information without ever having to set foot in a library. If she has a question, she can log into forums or comment on a blog and someone will reply with even more information. In the process she has educated herself and communicated with experts.

In the past to start a company a person would have to have an exorbitant amount of cash to find a place of business (whether it be a storefront, office location, warehouse space, etc) and now anyone can setup a website without knowing how to design or develop. They can even market that business without having to spend money through search marketing and social media marketing. Money is being transferred from person to person, business to consumer, and even business to business with ease. Instead of that one person setting up a business or retail shop and reaching the city surrounding them, they are now reaching millions of people and thousands of companies all over the world.

We now have access to so many countries, cultures, businesses, and people all from the point of one connection whether it be from a computer, phone, or other device. The possibilities of someone starting their own business, educating themselves and communicating with the world are endless. It's just up to that individual to know where to go to educate themselves on how to start their business, get an education and/or degree, research, network, and use the tools available to them to become successful.

Wappow's Rankings - I need meta tags

2010-12-15T12:44:00.000-08:00

Ok - I have to admit my bad on two accounts before I even post.

I haven't posted in a very long time. Well... I did post to the seogoddess.me site back when it was a blog site, but with the Network Solutions Wordpress hacks the site got attacked, database was corrupted and in my lack of patience deleted the whole site and went to html before anyone at NetSol could help me. So I'm back to my old blog that did get touched from time to time, but not nearly as much as it should have, and the posts I believe just aren't as cool as the other one was.
I didn't put Meta Tags on Wappow.com when I developed it. That's right - I got so design happy and making sure everything was so user friendly that I didn't focus on the back end of my SEO. Isn't that us SEO's complain about the most? Designers design, Usability experts focus on user friendliness, developers focus of cool html2 effects, and us SEO's are fighting the whole time saying "alt tag your images", "make your URLs and links within the site simple and consistent", and "That's cool, but can the bots read the text?".

So here I am almost a year into the Wappow.com website and it is ranking real well on Google for not only our branded terms, but for general 2-4 word terms as well. But what about Bing and Yahoo? Back in the day when I was optimizing for clients I could throw some keywords in the title, meta keywords, and description and rankings would come - but Google wasn't so easy.

Why is it that we see so much traffic from Google and not from the others? Is it because we do so much with social media marketing? According to Bing and Google social media plays a part in rankings (See SEOmoz.org article by Rand Fishkin). So perhaps that is the case...

According to my SEOmoz Crawl Diagnostics a lot of my pages are missing the meta description tag. I have unique titles, and everything else seems to check out ok, but this one error keeps popping up. I don't usually worry too much about it since the content ont he page pulls the description in if someone searches, but now that we are getting a lot of searches around terms like "emerging media conferences", "augmented reality", and "advertising conference 2011" I should start streamlining our SEO.
As I talk to people getting into SEO for the first time. I explain to them where search engines began so they can have an understanding of how SEO works from the core. Back when Excite, Lycos, and MSN got their start the search engines would scrub sites that were submitted to them and look at the keyword meta tags and see what sites should rank for those terms. As SEO became a job and more and more companies were realizing the importance of ranking on search engines spammers would trick, and search engines would adjust with algorithms. The need to submit your site to Excite, Lycos, MSN, and Yahoo! became irrelevant as they started using other sites, directories, and whois to find new websites. They started looking at the content within the site and if it matched up with the keywords listed in the meta tags. Then Google Came into play and changed the rules with each link counting as a vote.
The rules have obviously changed in the past 10-15 years, but as computers are as inteligent as the people that program them we all know that when a program is written, we don't rewrite the program from scratch each time we improve on the program. What we do is build on the existing technology to improve it. Just as Vista and Windows 7 is just an improved version of the original Windows the search engines still scrub the web and look for relevant keywords on a website and match them up to the search performed by the user. So never discount the meta tags - if anything they keyword tags will help you stay focused on what you want your site to rank for. With that focus defined on each page of the website your copy writers, developers, usability experts, and designers will maintain that focus still making your keyword tags relevant even if I am wrong about the search engines.

So as of today I will go through the website and add descriptions and the keyword meta tags (even though other SEO's say they don't matter) and we'll see if my theory still holds true. I'll post a follow-up (I promise) and share the data with you all once I see a difference.

Google Chrome OS - what does it mean?

2009-08-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

Announced in July of 2009 was Google Chrome OS - Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS - when I first read it I was shocked. Does this really mean that Google is going to try to develop an operating system?

The nitty gritty of the announcement is pretty abundant when you read who is involved and the work they are putting into the product is impressive. The whole goal is to launch a user friendly, ant-virus prone, system that people can install and start using without having to relearn and "to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web." In otherwords "It should just work."

In conjunction with my theory years ago about how TV, Phones, and the Internet will all work on one basic system as the technologies merge into one another the theory behind the Google Chrome OS and could computing is indicative that we are heading into a direction that our phones, computers, and television will all work as one streamlined process.

I can already see where Google is going to go as I recently was forced to purchase a Google Phone (G1) from T-Mobile as I went swimming with my iPhone that I had for over 2 years now. (pictured here) In order to get a new phone I had to sign a new 2 year contract with at&t which I was not ready to do. The best alternative was to use the extra line to my kids' T-Mobile account (which I have had since 2002). In addition to the lower cost to maintain the phone, the purchasing and setup of the phone was even easier then when I had originally gotten my iPhone. The downside was the fact that I had to setup a gmail account finally, but once setup and imported all my calendar items and my contacts from outlook they downloaded right to the phone. No using iTunes to synch my phone. It was all from the internet...

So you can probably see where Google is going with this. Right now with Google Docs, the Google G1 Phone, Gmail and signing in to the personalized Google search all of my information is stored in one place and synched without having to install software, plug in my phone, or learn how to do it. It just worked!

My prediction - the Google Chrome OS will get someone up on the internet and running with cloud computing in just a few simple steps:
1)Download the Google Chrome OS FREE!
2)Install
3)Enter your username and password for your Google Gmail, or personal account
4)and your all synched up including calendar, contacts, documents, email, etc.

Not to mention that they will be launching the open source by the end of 2009 so that other companies and developers can benefit through developing apps and the like as they have for the Google G1 phone.

...and the look: (unofficial photos courtesy of Mashable)

Rand Fishkin gets "Honest about Social Media Marketing"

2009-05-05T04:03:00.000-07:00

I am not one to engage in heated discussions especially topics thrown out in order to spark a "lively debate" on the internet. In fact my general rule is that if something strikes a cord with me I will sit on it a few days and will usually completely forget it ever was said but at times fins myself am still thinking on it. In which case I will then respond later when the initial reaction has wavered a bit.

Today I was hit by a posting that happened to spark a blogpost of my own after laying dormant for so many months. But why? Could it be that I am calmly in Florida for the Search Insider Summit wrapping up Winshuttle's Community Site (launching next Tuesday) and helping to put the final touches on Media Post's Search Insider Summit agenda, and speakers that I now have time to post? Possibly - since I still stick by my theory that people that have time to rant are people that don't have enough work to do. This evening I seem to fall into that category.

So my rant for the evening is in response to a good friend of mine Rand Fishkin. I am going to start off by stating that while I have known Rand for a short period of time he has been a great supporter and I still hold him in high regards. Unfortunately Rand Fishkin's post to his blog at 1:49 am Monday May 4th in which he states,

"The majority of marketers who engage in social media do so NOT because it produces greater ROI (professionally), but because the metrics are more immediately tangible and emotionally rewarding."

A very a bold statement in which Rand Fishkin continues to state his case by simplifying the act of what it takes to optimize a website,

"Let's say I put in some effort attracting more relevant visitors to my site. I see that a certain phrase is sending good quality traffic via my analytics and decide to pursue a higher ranking for that keyword. I do a bit of external link research, find some good places for a listing, maybe acquire a small handful of external links. I tweak the title tag, the H1 and a bit of the page content and make the call to action more prominent and compelling. I find a few important pages on my site (the top pages tool is badass for this) and place some good internal links. My rankings rise a few positions and I see more traffic the next week.

My conversions go up, and my company makes a few hundred more dollars in signups every week thereafter."

Now before I continue to quote his blog posting I am going to break a part the entire posting as I would an email to some of my favorite and very intelligent developers from my past (you know who you are) as we would discuss why work needed to be done on the website in order to obtain rankings (discussions that oddly don't happen anymore as more and more developers and others are seeing that SEO isn't a bunch of "smoke and mirrors"). In the past my emails would come with links to Google's webmaster guidelines and other websites that included SEO best practices, but in this case I am just going to state my opinion in response to Rand Fishkin's opinion (and remember, this is just my opinion).

So picking apart the above statement:

1) First item on the agenda "some effort". Really? SEO takes some effort? simply add meta tags, keywords, h1 tags and some internal linking and bam you have rankings...

If that were really the case a lot of us SEO's would be out of a job. Ok that statement was a bit broad - so more detail: Understanding the basics of SEO is great. Focus on a few key terms that you know your audience is searching for and get your Title tags to reflect them (so that the snippet draws your user to click when you do get rankings) place them in the correct densities within the content of your site (across the site for broad aggressive 1-2 word terms and whole pages around specific 3-5 word phrases for a more targeted audience) internal linking including those terms in the anchor text seeded throughout the site (yes the navigation on each page gets skipped as they are overlooked as shingles) with related content linking to other related content not just for users but bots as well.

Of course that's just scratching the surface - once you get rankings how you present your value proposition and your call to action after the user has clicked through the snippet to the page that is ranking is crucial in driving that conversion.

2) "I do a bit of external link research, find some good places for a listing, maybe acquire a small handful of external links." Where are these external links coming from? Rand doesn't get into detail here, but my assumption would be that the person obtaining the links would be hitting up forums that have postings on the topic in which they would be optimizing for, or comment on a blog post here and there with the phrase located in the comment surrounded by a hyperlink. But isn't that social media marketing? I would hope the SEO isn't purchasing links on a website somewhere, 'cause that would be bad...

Rand Fishkin continues to talk about the metrics of SEO and how effective the "some effort" is:

"To see 59 conversions this week vs. 53 from last week means an improvement of more than 10% for an investment of only a day's work. Repeat that process and you've got something amazing on your hands."

An average SEO makes anywhere between $30-$80,000 per years salary. let's assume that the SEO putting in "some effort" is a beginning SEO since the work is pretty basic. A days work would cost the company $115 for an SEO making $30,000 a year (not counting the cost in benefits, computer, software, etc). That "one days work" just brought in 6 more conversions than the week before bringing them to a $19 cost per conversion. I don't know about you but that's kinda high. In fact I just brought Winshuttle from a $18 cost per conversion in Adwords to now $6 cost per conversion and increased conversions from 100 per week to 100 per day with 1 weeks work. (not gonna bring my salary into it, I'll let you figure out the math on your own)

Rand Fishkin goes on to talk about the social media side of his statement. Now here's where I am going to slightly agree with him that the psychology of having friends is what drives social media marketing. In fact studies have shown over the past few years that the driving factor behind social networking and why it is becoming so popular is the psychology of human interaction. When it comes to the buying decision process us humans will usually talk to friends or go into a store and talk to a salesperson about their take on products comparing each item's pros and cons before making that purchase. why do we want to do this? We are social creatures at heart and will "trust" anything a "friend" has to say about something before we make that decision ourselves. How many times have you not only gone to a friend before making a buying decision, but talked to a friend before making life decisions in general? Choosing what college to go to, who you want to date, if you should marry them or not, should you buy a house or rent an apartment, and so on. Ultimately the decision is yours but you generally won't make it without talking to someone first.

That is where the power of social media comes into play. Especially in my case at Winshuttle working with business to business as the purchasing decision making process takes months and requires a bit of nurturing throughout. That process can be sped up or solidified in the company's direction if handled appropriately as the lead comes through the gate. Social media plays a huge part in that initial messaging. If the user sees the brand not only mentioned but talked about in a positive way before ever coming to the site they are swayed that much more before we capture that lead. If this is done right it not only shortens the buying cycle, but also frees up our sales people by bringing them more qualified leads faster. The less time they take, the more they can close, the less the company has to pay per qualified lead and so on and so on.

Here's where I start to pick apart Rand's post piece by piece:

After showing a screenshot of SEOmoz's own analytics rand fishkin goes on by pointing out that Twitter has only .35% of the conversions while Google holds .72%,

"There's Twitter at the bottom of the list, bringing 10K+ visits to our site! That's huge, right?

Here's the problem... It's also the lowest converting traffic of any referral source - less than half that of aggregate Google referrals."

Here Rand is counting just Twitter, but what about Facebook, or possibly other social sites in which SEOmoz is mentioned? When I search for SEOmoz I see not only the offical website but look - there's twitter, a blog (copyblogger.com), youtube, stumbleupon, digg and of course Facebook (on page 2). All which obtain rankings and help in solidifying the SEOmoz brand as users conduct research for the best ways to learn how to optimize their website or look for cool tools to help in optimizing the site. Oh and wait - wasn't this blog posting by Rand himself social media marketing? In looking at the amount that Rand Fishkin blogs seems that he manages to get in at least 1 post a day if not every few days.

Rand continues on by stating,

"I grant that direct referrals are never the whole story, and that there is real branding, marketing and user acquisition value to the traffic, participation and effort spent in social media. What I worry about is whether these intangibles are worth the expenditure.

In every one of the social media cases, the feedback and the metrics are coming from real people that I can reply to, hear back from and strike up a conversation with. The lonely days of lines & numbers as the only recompense for my marketing efforts are at an end. When I engage in social media marketing, I don't feel like an SEO geek, toiling against an algorithm and an anonymous search audience. I feel like a social butterfly, blossoming in the world of Twitter & Facebook, the same outlets the media is raving on about all day long (when not obsessed with swine flu, that is)."

I admit I myself tend to get distracted from time to time when a topic I am interested becomes a buzz on Twitter or Facebook. I of course will justify it by saying that it's for work since most of the discussions I take an interest in are online marketing related. There are days in which I know I need to sit with my head down and get work done and those are the days that the tweetdeck gets shut off and I don't touch Facebook until I get home at night and the kids are fast asleep.

Just as any addiction, social networking should be used in moderation.

Why am I picking on Rand you ask? Because this is a point of discussion each time I go out with Rand and give him a hard time about not tweeting a lot (or that Todd Friesen tweets too much) or that Rand doesn't follow a lot of people on Twitter (but neither do I so I can't pick on him there) or that he almost never logs into Facebook and ads all those people that want to be his friend. He just "doesn't understand why people are so addicted to Twitter or Facebook". A discussion we continue to have and have always walked away with Rand Fishkin continuing to have his opinion and the rest of us social media brats with ours.

I know that in the case of my position at Winshuttle the social media work has become extremely effective in not only generating brand awareness in resolving issues people might have for SAP that Winshuttle's products can solve, but also in engaging SAP consultants that might use transactionSHUTTLE with one client and recommend it for another (I actually have quite a few consultants as Facebook friends and have engaged in discussions with them at times).

The moral of my story is simply this. Rand Fishkin's post brought up a statement I have been often telling people especially as I am here attending the Media Post Email and Search Insider Summits that Social Media Marketing is today what SEO was several years ago. Back in the day when I worked for an agency and then at Classmates the struggle was to get buy in from others in order to get changes made for search optimization. Optimizing was more about proving that SEO was valid and worked when there was no way of really tracking that the efforts made were bringing in the dough (ROI). Now Search optimization has become not only proven over and over to the extent that executives and other people are asking me what are we going to do next (rather than me asking for the work and getting some of it done) but is now easily tracked and measured.

I say give social media a few years (especially in today's economy) as company's start to see the value in the benefits a tweet a day and a Facebook page can make.

SEO/SEM Salaries - Actual Survey Results

2009-01-23T17:33:00.000-08:00

As the search marketing industry grows by importance and the qualified individuals that choose to make a career from search marketing (either SEO or PPC) gain experience and insight as search becomes more and more complex we start to ask ourselves are we really making what we are worth? As Richard Zwicky pointed out during his lunch and learn at the Search Insider Summit in Park City Utah this last December of 2008 a lot of us SEO's left contemplating our salaries.
Rand Fishkin posted a general guideline with job titles and descriptions back in 2006, and Payscale even reported their findings on January 20, 2009 based on individual's years of experience as well as broken down by city and state. Unfortunately Rand's salary ranges while pretty acurate are quite broad leaving most of us thinking "Yeah I fit somewhere in between, but where exactly?" and Payscale leaving some of us wondering how the heck does someone actually have over 10 years of experience as an SEO? Not to mention the salary difference of someone that has between 1-4 years and 5-9 years experience really not jumping that considerably.
Being the research junkie that I am I decided to run my own SEO salary survey. I posted the form on my blog back in July of 2008 and waited to recieve over 1,000 participants grabbing not only their SEO salaries, but the company size, agency or in-house, and so on. The results were pretty interesting, and I have to admit renewed my faith in the industry once again that us SEO people are valued more than we were 7 years ago (when I was making $35k a year as an SEO Lead).

As you can see most SEO people search anywhere between $30,000 to $89,000 per year salary with a larger number in the $50,000 to $89,000 per year salary range. Though it still looks like quite a lot of the agency SEO's are making under $29,000 per year salary. Rarely will you see an SEO making over $90,000 while working at an agency.
In-house SEO's however have a different (ut not by much) salary range than the agency SEO's with the majority making anywhere between $30,000 to $49,000 and $50,000 to $89,000 per year salary again with the majority bringing in $50,000 to $89,000 per year salary. But as you can see a much larger percentage earn over $90,000 per years salary as in-house SEO's than the agency SEO's.
As I pointed out in my last post comparing the roles of an in-house SEO vs someone that would work for an agency I suggested in the end that someone wanting to make SEO a career would benefit from starting out in an agency and moving to in-house full time as they gain more experience and knowledge. With more and more companies hiring in-house SEO's these companies are recognizing that the role these people play should be in the upper management positions requiring a higher salary range, and more and more are even beginning to develop entire teams rather than using agencies (or to supplement the agency).

SEO Career - Agency vs. In-House SEO

2009-01-15T12:03:00.000-08:00

As the search industry grows agencies are popping up all over and more and more companies are hiring in-house SEO's. How does one decide to get into search engine optimization and which direction does one take in their career path? In-House SEO or SEO Agency?
In 2006 I finally jumped ship from SEO Agency to full time in-house SEO at Classmates.com as their SEO Manager. It was a position created with no real thought put into it as to what work was needed, how to scale the effectiveness of the position, or who the position would be reporting to but there definitely was a need for someone in-house as the agency they were working with at the time had great suggestions for SEO but weren't able to get the work completed.
I was originally hired to work under one of the VPs in Marketing who was very good at analysis, but not so much on the technical side of the website, and most certainly didn't understand SEO. He set me loose after I explained the keyword analysis and analyzing what terms were driving conversions from paid search in order to determine a starting point for optimizing the site. Unfortunately that VP quit just a few weeks after my hiring along with not having someone to directly guide me I continued to work on the site as if I were a consultant optimizing for a client. During the first couple of months I befriended a few of the VPs throughout the company who had setup a meeting with Ted Cahall (CEO) along with a group of developers, Directors and other VPs in order to hammer out what changes needed to be made and set a priority. Close to the end of the meeting Ted Cahall had asked me how much revenue I predicted out of these changes. A concept I had never even thought of. As consultants our goal is to optimize the site and increase traffic or rankings as much as possible to show that our work was effective. It was always up to the clients and the website to drive the conversions. Now I was faced with an end-to-end process that I had worried about as a UI designer, but never as an SEO.
My role as an in-house SEO was definitely a learning experience for both Classmates.com and myself. Being in-house and optimizing a website is a completely different beast altogether. This posting looks at the different aspects of each role pointing out the pros and cons in hopes that SEO's can not only understand the difference, but can make a decision as to what direction they would like to go in as a career.

Agency SEO

Depending on the position you are in with an agency the responsibilities change but the end result will always remain the same. Most often than not when a client signs a contract they expect certain things from their agency. A client usually chooses SEO because they aren't showing up in the search engines for terms that they feel they should be showing up for. The reasoning behind this is if they show up for the right terms they will see more conversions or leads from the website they invested so much money in with design and development. For them it all boils down to revenue, for the SEO agency it translates into ranking and ultimately traffic (eventually digging into qualified traffic and leads).
Typically most SEO agencies will have anywhere from 10 to possibly hundreds of clients assigned to one search engine optimizer (or SEO Strategist). Each SEO Strategist begins working with each client by asking a few questions in order to understand the business model and what the client considers an aquisition. The SEO Strategist will then draw up a keyword analysis looking through words and terms based on what the client thinks their users will be suing to find their website. From there the SEO Strategist will choose a select few terms that are most relevant and develop meta tags (Title and Description), suggest copy revisions or additions to the website, suggest a linking strategy and so on. The agency will then send regular ranking reports along with tracking analysis of the traffic coming to the site through natural SEO.
Some SEO agencies have grown beyond the cookie cutter fashion of optimizing a website for their clients in offering landing page design, testing, optimization etc. or even offering social media campaigns that generate links as well as traffic from social networking websites or blogs, etc.

In-House SEO

In the past couple of years more and more companies are bringing SEO in-house not to replace the agency they are using necessarily, but to help manage the relationship between the agency and the people internally that need to complete the work in order to champion the work through effectively. To explain the role of an in-house SEO is to list out most of the responsibilities and goals of what is expected of them.
Core responsibilities of an in-house SEO:
Develop the company and or website SEO strategy and implementation. (complete with time line, work needed from other teams, agency help, etc along with spend)
Hands-on optimization; improving site structure, page construction, content, keyword lists, and SEO copy writing where needed (some companies have copywriters on staff and developers allocated for the work needed)
Keyword Analysis, and set KPI benchmarking and reporting for sites' organic search optimization efforts and continual monitoring of search trends related to the company or website.
Define SEO requirements in a product management capacity by recommending site enhancements that maximize ROI and increase rank of natural search result listings.
Serve as internal search expert, driving all communication between company's domestic and/or international companies to ensure best practices are shared and leveraged throughout.
Work on landing page redesign projects to ensure that paid and natural search pages are not only maximizing traffic but driving conversions.
Analyze and translate quantitative and qualitative data from web analytics tool into an actionable SEO plan.
Create and validate business cases for projects.
Maintain dashboard with work completed including spend along with conversions for each item in order to track cost per acquisition for natural SEO. (in some cases you will be expected to report this to upper level executives or help your superior report your work and effectiveness)
For some larger organizations an in-house SEO can be expected to:
Document business requirements for other teams, working with stakeholders throughout the organization to factor in their needs.
Is the business voice for SEO projects throughout the product development process, working closely with the technology organization.
Experience in defining and writing product/functional specifications

In some cases an in-house SEO is expected to:
Work closely with the paid search marketing team (if not part of the responsibilities as an in-house SEO - depending on the company size) in creating SEO strategy to increase organic traffic and rankings.
Leverage social networking, user generated content and PR releases to drive qualified traffic. (as social media becomes recognized as a high impact strategy I believe companies will start to hire social media people as a role all its own)
Manage SEO initiatives for Google beta programs such as, mash ups for Google maps, Google co-op, plug-ins for Google desktop, widgets and other incremental SEO opportunities where applicable.
Set up a process to continuously educate internal teams on SEO best practices and emerging optimization techniques.

As you can see the roles and resposinbilities of the in-house SEO and SEO Agency employee are completely different, but yet both require a solid understanding of SEO. So how does one get started in SEO as a career? If you are passionate about SEO and you find that you have a unique satisfaction of seeing a website or page rank for a term you targeted then you have been bitten by the SEO bug and are definitely cut out to work both for an agency or in-house. It is highly recommended that you start with a smaller agency or on your own optimizing as many websites for clients as you can. Gather data and document as much as you can so that when you go to the agency or company hiring an in-house SEO you have examples of your work to show you understand the basics and can at least optimize a website. Agencies give you the opportunity to work with multiple websites and clients so that you not only get different scenarios of website optimization, but become exceptionally good at working with people along with the common questions such as, "I searched 'X' and we don't show up, why?" The questions you get from clients as an SEO Strategist in an agency prepare you for the same questions you will get occasionally see as an in-house SEO.
When you are ready to make the transition from agency to in-house SEO be prepared to have a robust understanding of marketing and how they track conversions, budget, etc as well as having the patience in working with other teams such as copywriters, designers, developers, legal, PR and so on. You will not only have to know SEO well, but to be able to explain different aspects of it to people that think differently from you. For example, when talking to a designer you will want to stress the importance of copy on a page that would most likely have a design focus in order to get key terms in there, or explain to someone in legal that you don't have complete control over what ranks in the search engines.
All in all both positions are very rewarding and a job in search engine optimization is not only challenging, but a lot of fun with a constant evolution in strategy and know how.

For more help on getting started in a career in SEO visit:
Market Motive SEO Training
SEOMoz Beginner's Guide to SEO

Search Insider Summit - Park City UT December 2008 - Review

2008-12-12T11:43:00.000-08:00

As I boldly stated in my last post about the May Search Insider Summit that “I will Never Go to Another SES or SMX Again…” I think that the feedback I received when Paul Richardson (My former VP of Acquisitions while I was at Classmates.com) posted a comment to my Facebook wall so eloquently says it all;

“Jenn,
It was great seeing you. The SIS in Deer Valley was one of the best summits I have been to in years for meeting relevant people and learning about the industry from people who are living it everyday. If I can make it to one of these shows a year I can skip AdTech and SES and come out ahead.”

For this is what the Search Insider Summit is all about. It’s about building relationships with experienced and knowledgeable search marketers as well as networking with other agencies, in-house marketers, and hob knobbing with representatives of the search engines themselves. As the Search Insider Summit continues to grow and take shape into what some would call an elite group of individuals it is become not so much the “Little Engine that Could” as Gord Hotchkiss so fondly calls it, but rather the “Diamond in the Rough” as I like to refer to it. I have been asked time and time again why I am so passionate about the Search Insider Summit over the larger and more popular Search Engine Strategies or Search Marketing Experts conferences. My personal answer is simply this: As an in-house marketer I have attended numerous conferences large and small only to find that while I have a lot of contacts in the business I am still alone. I attend the sponsored events, the cocktails, dinners, etc and have yet to walk into a room and start talking to people as if we were long time friends as I do at the Search Insider Summit. At the Search Insider Summit I grab breakfast in the morning and sit down in the conference room to find myself surrounded my new friends and enjoying a highly information conversation by a panel that seems to take on a whole new life than what was ever intended not having to hear the same presentation by the same group of individuals that seem to attend the SES or SMX conferences. I then walk away from the Search Insider Summit after a few short days knowing so much more about search marketing and the role it plays within the larger spectrum of marketing and exchanging emails, phone calls, and adding hundreds of new BFFs to my Twitter and Facebook followers and friends.

Comparisons aside – I followed up this last Summit with conversations and emails about other people’s experience of the Summit. From agencies to in-house marketers it was interesting to find that while their experiences might have been different, their comments summed up in the end to be quite similar. For example, Micah Nyatsambo SEO Manager at Media Contacts Felt that while the conference was short he was happy to find that after talking to individuals at the table topic discussions he wasn’t alone;

“I really enjoyed the table breakouts! Those were fantastic. It enabled us to discuss issues, successes and failures within an atmosphere of fellow marketers. The discussions where really full of insights and learnings about what to do when faced with certain situations. From an Agency SEO perspective we can't always do the latest and greatest and sometimes our work is more political than practicing SEO. This was really good for me to know that others face the same situations and how to start looking for that internal evangelist that can help your cause. “

In turn Erica Forrette who is the Senior Manager, Online Acquisition at Pacific Sunwear had a very similar experience even though she is on the other side of the fence being an in-house marketer;

“I could get really great advanced insights as to how to use search in new ways, as well as learn about tools I didn't know, from those cutting-edge agencies WITHOUT feeling like I was gonna get pitched like crazy. I liked being able to sit with other ecommerce marketers and ask about techniques that I was considering trying to find out their experiences.”

The table discussions are a unique part of the Search Insider Summit while there are the usual panels with the occasion presentation from one or more of the panelists the organizers of the Summit try to keep the presentations short to open the topic up for discussion. The Panel will even sit on a small stage in comfortable chairs with a coffee table in front of them to provide a level of comfort and engage the audience into the topic as a free flowing discussion. After which the panelists will break out into tables where the Summit attendees can dig deeper into their aspect of the topic.

A perfect explanation of this is from the topic I had moderated on Day two entitled Silo Smashing -- Putting Search at the Center of Your Marketing Mix in preparing for the panel I had asked them to send over any presentation slide decks they had along with summaries or points of interest in which they wanted to cover specifically. All three of the panelists had topic points they wanted to cover, but neither had a formal presentation. After some back and forth I had come up with a sort of agenda starting with my short interpretation of how search can play a role in all aspects from basic marketing to even HR optimizing job descriptions, then into Introductions by each individual followed by the following questions and who wanted to cover each topic:

In what ways does search play a role in other channels for example the larger media programs? – Aaron

How does search interplay with other channels? – John

What, if any, issues are there that can arise between channels? - Janel

Search used as a research tool – Aaron

Interestingly enough while I was trying to be my usual highly organized prepared self the discussion took a turn and covered ground that neither of us were really counting on, but was highly important to the audience. Media Post was kind enough to record the discussion on video so you can get a feel for what I mean.

As the past attendees of the Search Insider Summit have not only learned a lot about search marketing and the role search plays within online marketing as a whole, but they have also formed good solid relationships through networking with other agencies, other advertisers, and representatives from some of the top tools provided for them. It would benefit any employer to not only attend themselves, but to bring their entire team no matter what level they are to help improve their teams knowledge making them more successful, but to help the members of their team advance in their career.

For more information about upcoming events visit the Search Insider Summit official Media Post page or visit one of the following promoters of the Summit:

Note: If you know of a page, or someone that promotes the Summit, let me know

Search Insider Summit - Conversation:Bridging the Data Divide

2008-12-04T09:08:00.000-08:00

Interesting conversation topic this morning after the Obama discussion. While normally you would think that from a panel covering data for search we would hear about how to track from campaign (or even keyword) all the way through the acquisition, but not in today's discussion. Albeit short, John Marshall (Formerly the CEO and Founder of web-analytics-success story ClickTracks Analytics and developer of video games at 14) touched on a point that has been befuddling me the past few months. How effective is analytics in truly understanding the value of your clicks, users, and acquisitions?
I have been known as the analytics geek that tracks from keyword searched on what search engine (or site) that drove them to what page(s) of the site to final acquisition (or in some cases lead through sales funnel to purchase)and while all of that data and analysis is valuable from a left brained numbers perspective what about how the user thinks, reacts, and makes a decision to click where? Analytics may be able to give us the insight into the 90% of users that purchase, fill out a form, or sign up for a subscription and how they flow through the funnel; but what about the 10% that bailed at some point? Or saw your ad and didn't click the first time, but clicked the 5th time? How do we squeeze that last little bit out of the turnip?
John mentioned surveys... It's a concept that I learned from David Evans (now with psychster.com) while at Classmates.com. David continued to remind me to dig into the psyche of the user with his weekly market research open to anyone in the company that had any sort of interest. As the SEO Manager you wouldn't think that I would be worried about what the user was thinking once they got into the site, but to the contrary it helped me tremendously as I targeted individuals through natural search strategies. It helped me to understand the trigger points of what users were interested in once they were members and present them with tidbits of what was inside (value propositions) in order to give them what they were looking for and understanding that while they couldn't have it now, they could have it once inside.

During today's discussion John mentioned having simple surveys on your site that can help you gather more qualified data. From a standard survey, or even adding a few questions to the form that grabs your acquisition.
John mentioned the 3 questions you should ask the visitors to the your site:
1) Why are you here?
2) Did you achieve what you wanted to achieve?
3) If not - why?

Three simple questions that could give you so much insight that the numbers from analytics that never will.

Online Marketing Strategy and Your Target Persona

2008-12-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

Whether you are planning a natural search targeting campaign, a paid search marketing strategy or a social media strategy it’s always best to know who you are targeting before implementing any of your campaign or strategy. But how do you know who you are targeting and how to target them?

The www.savethebreakfastsandwich.com (STBS) website was originally developed as a fun site after speaking with a colleague in February 2008 in finding out that Howard Schultz was planning on discontinuing them in October of 2008. The goal was to develop a website where breakfast sandwich lovers could join in support of keeping them with a discussion board with stories and discussions supporting the sandwiches.

In this website’s case my main goal was to encourage people to sign up and possibly join in on the discussions. The site isn’t a money maker, but rather a site that was to generate buzz and enough members to hopefully convince Starbucks that the Breakfast Sandwich is worth keeping. In order to determine who I would be targeting in my strategies I had to go back to the type of person that enjoys walking into Starbucks and ordering a breakfast sandwich, and then narrow it down to the type of person that would be upset enough to rally in support. From there this person had to be technically savvy and one who is involved in the internet (i.e. active in sites such as Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.).

As I dug deeper into the personality of the STBS Persona I narrowed it down to a male between the age of 20-30 who is very active in the online community having Facebook and Myspace profiles so that he would talk about the site and the story of the Breakfast Sandwich being discontinued creating awareness. He also has his own websites and/or Blog in which he would post a blurb about the story and link back to the website (generating awareness and linking credit for SEO). He is a very sarcastic individual and loves to mock the large corporations (what I like to call the conforming non-conformist). He also enjoys a good controversy (but only the obscure ones). Let’s call him Brian…

Now that I know I am targeting Brian, where he enjoys hanging out on the web, and what he does, as well as what will spark his interest it was time to determine a strategy. Every online marketing plan should have a basic strategy of 4 channels.

1) Search Engine Optimization – natural rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and more

2) Paid Search Marketing – paid placements starting with bidding on key words and showing up in search results on the top sponsored or right side placements up to placements on other sites (per keyword bidding and/or placement targeting) to even banner ad placements(per keyword bidding and/or placement targeting)

3) Social Media Marketing – generating brand awareness and/or buzz about a website, company or product through social sites such as Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin, and more

4) Traditional Banners – with sites such as Adready in which your ads can appear across a network of sites generating awareness.

Depending on your budget and man power you should have a clear plan established before ever beginning any work or hiring of agencies to help you.

In the case of the STBS site I had no budget whatsoever, with limited amount of manpower since I was already marketing full time for Concur Technologies.

With a budget of nothing and limited manpower I set a plan that solely relied on the controversy of the Breakfast Sandwich being discontinued to trigger Brian to start talking immediately. I developed the site in 3 days keeping all search engine optimization in play with each page and across the entire site, and focused on promoting it as much as I could through social media sites.

Natural SEO

My main target was to rank for “Starbucks” of course, but second would be to show up naturally for “Breakfast Sandwich”, “Starbucks Breakfast”, “Starbucks breakfast sandwiches”, etc.

When targeting a persona and optimizing a website for that persona it’s always important to pay attention to the following 4 optimization techniques:

1) Landing Pages – focus on obscure terms (long tailed key phrases) that are 3-5 words in length that your persona might specifically be searching for and provide them with a landing page or 2-4 page microsite that gives them exactly what they are looking for.

2) Meta Tags – each landing page and page of your website should keep your persona in mind as you write the title and description. If a persona is looking for the “Starbucks breakfast sandwich” the result should explain what the site is about. Especially in the case of the STBS site. We don’t want a user searching for the actual sandwich to click the result and close out the website because they didn’t see the sandwiches. If they saw a result that talks about the demise and saving the sandwich and they choose to click the result then they are already aware of what the site is about and less likely to close out.

3) Internal Linking – when it comes to the persona the links pointing to other pages is very important. If you have a page seeded with links within the content the person might be compelled to click through to irrelevant pages and get lost within the site. Focus on the links that would be most important to them as they land on the pages that rank with clear calls to action (graphical buttons, banners, etc) and keep the linking to other pages in the sitemap or on pages that are more relevant.

4) External Linking – external linking is a great source for SEO credit. Encourage users to link to stories, landing pages, posts, etc. by adding “bookmark us” with the more popular bookmarking sites (Google, Digg, del.icio.us, etc) and encourage them to add links to their blogs or websites to specific pages with quick html they can copy and paste and talk about on their blog.

Of course this is all in addition to the standard SEO such as xml sitemaps, robots.txt, etc.

Social Media

Keeping my persona Brian in mind as I looked to other sites to talk about the STBS site and spark controversy I started with other blogs that discussed Starbucks either by fans or had Starbucks coffee drinkers talking to one another. I particularly started with a comment to a blog post that was a few days old on the Starbucks Gossip Blog - http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2008/01/starbucks-to-ge.html

The comment was quickly picked up and blogged about http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2008/02/seven-people-ha.html. The site immediately took off from there with blog postings from local obscure publications such as Seattle’s own Stranger http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/save_the_starbucks_breakfast_sandwich , to the New York Times http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/blogtalk-burgled-in-the-burg/

From there the site took off for the first few weeks it was launched. People were buzzing about it faster than I could keep track. Knowing that this groundswell wouldn’t last long (as most controversies die off within weeks or even days) I had to keep the momentum going as well as implement an SEO strategy that would keep the awareness of the site prominent in the internet culture.

With regards to the social media I kept commenting on blogs and sending out emails to members that would be interesting enough for them to forward on. I also setup a Facebook page and occasionally promoted it through my profile, twitter tweet, etc.

The SEO strategy was focused on local targeting. I developed a database of every city in every state across the US and created a page for each state and then the city targeting individuals that would be searching for a Starbucks in their area. The beauty of SEO is that you don’t have to be as specific to the user since you aren’t paying for the ad. The goal with these pages was to mention the demise of the breakfast sandwich in the snippet itself. The user would be searching for Starbucks close to their home, work, hotel, etc (for example starbucks felton, CA) then see the result and read “Find the Starbucks in FELTON - CA for your favorite breakfast sandwich before they are discontinued.” The user would click the result out of curiosity (not a highly qualified referral – but SEO has next to $0 cost per click so it has room for less qualified click throughs) the user then sees a landing page that educates them more about the decision to discontinue the breakfast sandwich and encourages them to sign up to help support it. Signup is free and easy which makes that decision fairly easy (with a 40% conversion rate from those pages from natural traffic).

Of course if I had an ad placed the messaging, and landing page would be much different, but again, this is SEO so we have a bid of legroom to convince rather than just presenting as we would with paid advertising so that our return on investment would be higher.

Always remember your user with any marketing strategy - a banner ad should spark curiosity and educate before the user clicks so that it is not only noticed but the user knows what to expect before clicking through, whereas a PPC ad should be specific to the term you are bidding on with the ad and landing page giving the user exactly what they are looking for. Pay attention to who your user is, what they are looking for and where you are grabbing them from and you will be successful in your marketing.

Optimize Your Landing Pages Without Disturbing Your Tests

2008-08-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

When I was first approached by Mark (CEO of Smartsheet) with the opportunity to work for them in marketing I was excited about the product and all that it has to offer. I was even more impressed while in the first week in my new position to find out that they had already implemented landing pages with a complete user flow. From paid search advertising that pointed to a landing page that then sent the user through a very simple registration process, then showing the user a template that helped them get started based on the landing page or ad they came from. The user experience was unique depending on what each user was interested in. How brilliant!

The VP of Marketing (Maria) had done an excellent job working with Widemile in optimizing the original landing pages. With over 40-50 landing pages they were able to take the results from a select few pages and apply them across the rest of the 40 to 50 pages that weren’t tested, resulting in an increase from a 4-5% conversion rate up to over 6-12% by redesigning a select few and testing the designs against the original. (read the article on btobonline.com here)
With the website going through a complete redesign and a new product rolling out I wasn’t sure if we were going to see the same results, or if I could try some of the strategies I had used in the past with Classmates or Concur to increase the conversions. Luckily I had 40+ landing pages to work with that all had templates associated with them. I started with the most popular based on the natural search traffic. A lot of the landing pages were indexed and had a pagerank of 4-6 (depending on the page). So I took the pages that were driving the most conversions naturally and applied three different designs across them. We launched the new site and our BETA product in July 2008 and thus the landing pages were setup for A/B testing (A being a design based off of winning combinations against 3 new design layouts) in 3 groups. I captured the paid search marketing campaigns that were setup before and split them up by content targeting, and search only instead of one lump in one campaign (difficult to track effectiveness of ads on content, vs. search). The first week of launch our paid search marketing campaigns were converting at 6%. Over the course of the few weeks I noticed that the content network was converting higher, and the landing pages were doing much better with the new designs. Over the course of the few weeks I optimized the campaigns and created banners to see if I could drive more traffic to the landing pages for testing. By the end of July 2008 I was able to get the overall conversion rate up to over 9%.

In August I created adgroups for each landing page (20 of the top converting pages) complete with text ads, banners, and a template that the user would see once signed up. I implemented the winning test design on the pages, and added some new elements for multivariate testing in 2 groups. One group had an emphasis on “Free Account” and the other had an “easy as 1-2-3 to sign up” block to the right. Our conversion rate jumped up to over 11% (getting close to what we were at in the past). With the “Free Account” traffic we noticed that the users were less likely to stick around so we pulled the “Free Account” wording off of the pages. Since I was testing other elements on those pages and not the “Free Account” I grabbed a footprint of where the conversions were so I could see if removing the words would affect the conversion rate. At the same time I added a block with a list of our value props to some of the pages. Once again, since I didn’t have enough data to stop the test, and adding the block wasn’t a part of the tested elements I took a footprint of where the pages were at.
I did notice a drop in the conversions from the “Free Account” removal, with an increase on the pages I added the value props to.

I charted a few of our results below for you to see:

I am happy to say that as a result of the small changes I made (while keeping the tests going) I was able to increase our overall conversion rate to nearly 15% by the end of August 2008.
The lesson learned is that you don’t have to keep stopping and starting new tests just to make small changes, and the small changes you make can still be tracked if you just grab the data before you make the change. You do still want your tests to run long enough to collect enough data for the small changes you make, but the idea is to leave the multivariate testing for 1-2 elements (that way you get faster results with less combinations). Do remember that these are tests, and the data your are collecting through multivariate, and especiall A to B, shouldn't be manipulated too often otherwise your results could be skewed be all the changes you made along the way.

Just as I was able to get templates to show up when our users sign in, I took the time to setup the sheet that I keep track of my landing pages as a template - complete with tips on how to keep track of it all. Just click the link here, sign up and you should see the template once you have verified your email.
Happy Testing!

SEO Survey

2008-07-19T21:28:00.000-07:00

After signing up for one of Google's beta testing applications through their form that posts directly to the google doc spreadsheet I thought I would give it a try and create an SEO survey through Google docs myself. The results are published directly to the doc as the survey is submitted.
Take a moment and fill out the survey yourself. The results will update automatically as people fill it out and submit it, and I will post the data in all its glory to the public with pie chart sand everything for all to see. It will be interesting to see what comes of the answers.

The form is no longer available

The Misinterpretation of the internet...

2008-06-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

On Monday June 16, 2008 Gail Geronimos had posted an article on her blog about Brent Frei (co-founder and chairman of the board at smartsheet.com) summarizing his very informative article that was posted to Venturebeat.com on April 21, 2008. She starts by stating that the article "was written by Brent Frei, founder of Bellevue."
Now mind you - the Bellevue she is referring to is my hometown that is located across Lake Washington from the major metropolitan city Seattle, WA. A few of us in the office got a chuckle out of Brent being the founder of Bellevue, WA - but in actuality it was founded in 1869 by William Meydenbauer.
This to me is yet another example of how the internet can be the misinterpretation of facts. Given that Gail Geronimos is from Australia she would have had no idea that Brent wasn't the founder of Bellevue, or even that Bellevue is a city all it's own. Through no fault of her own she had misinterpreted what she had read for at the bottom of the article Brent had posted stating "Brent Frei is founder of Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet.com, a privately-held Software as a Service (SaaS) provider."
Remember the old rumor game that we played where we would whisper a statement into someone's ear and that person would then whisper to the person next to them, and so on until the person at the end would then say what they had been whispered out loud and it would never be what the original statement was said? Could it be that the internet is becoming the rumor mill that we experienced in our younger days?
It's up to us marketing and PR people to keep track of not only our company as a whole, but the company's representatives as well as our own personal interpretations.
...and no - I am not actually a Goddess, I just play one on IT ;o)

More and more companies are hiring agencies or even in-house teams to monitor the rumors that fly on the internet as quickly as they become posted. But with today's technology it's becoming increasingly difficult to catch all that there is out there...

Jenn

I will never go to another SES or SMX again...

2008-05-26T02:33:00.000-07:00

That's what I said to Gord Hotchkiss at Media Posts Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island in Florida just last week.
Why would I be so bold as to make such a statement? The reasoning behind this has been brewing for quite some time. I attended my first SES a couple of years ago in New York and was amazed at all I could learn. I was an in-house SEO for Classmates.com at the time and benefited quite a lot from attending the in-house discussions. It was soon after the posting about the top in-house SEO's (of which I was inadvertently mentioned) and the discussions on in-house SEM were started by mentioning the posting with the moderator moving on to asking those in the room four questions that answers made me feel like I was not alone in the world of frustration from being an in-house SEO.
1) How many of you are in-house SEO's? (1/2 of the room raised their hand)
2) How many of you are manager level? (3/4 of those people raised their hands - including myself)
3) How many of you are Director level? (a select few raised their hands)
4) How many of you are VP or above? (none raised their hands)

From there the hand holding seemed to proceed in discussion by the panel. They talked about making friends with the people you work with and how to educate people in your company about search. I myself have joked with my colleagues that SEO is like God, it's in everything you do. Designers and copywriters can learn from it, developers should know it's boundaries, usability marketers can learn from the behavior of a search referral, and executives can benefit from the ROI.
It was nice to see that others were having the same struggles of educating and collaborating in order to leverage SEO within the company.

I have attended several conferences both SES and SMX since then in the past few years and have always attended the in-house discussions to continue to benefit from the speakers. As the number of us in-house SEO's has grown as has our responsibilities (to full SEM) so has the awareness by major corporations for the need of an in-house SEM. More and more fortune 500 (and larger) corporations are hiring in-house SEM's to manage paid and natural search. Whole teams are being developed and the need for qualified experienced individuals is in demand to manage these teams.

The disappointing part of it is that while the role of an in-house SEO or SEM has grown the conference tracks on in-house remain the same. I still see the same presentations on how to educate the people you work with on SEO and how to gain support and interest by your colleagues. While that is helpful for the newbies coming in what about us old folks that have already broken those barriers? Or now that SEO and SEM is becoming more well known and companies are becoming more aware, the struggle for support and buy in is less existent while the need to know how to leverage search from the inside is becoming greater. It's less focus on the people and more focus on how can the company generate revenue from search. From technical issues to landing pages, analytics, user experience, and the psychology behind the searcher - we are in need of more tracks on those issues and less on the hand holding (though the hand holding is still nice).

So back to my bold statement to Gord last week...
I see the Search Insider Summit becoming more of a support for us in-house SEM's as the topics really seem to dig into the psyche, pushing us past the office politics and really digging into the nitty gritty of search.

Answering the questions:

How do we leverage search within the company?

To satisfy the watchful eyes of our executives how do we create initiatives that will generate more qualified traffic from search?

How do we measure our successes?

From analytics and reporting to dashboards that show our increasing successes - how do we show an increase in ROI? (it's not just about rankings)

How do we overcome technical road blocks?

From duplicate content issues, to redirects, site architecture, and more - how do we overcome the road blocks through seeking knowledge inside or outside the company that we face as in-house SEO's that help us become successful in our careers?

I have high hopes for the Insider Summit the next go around, and it's not just the beautiful setting of Captiva Island (though I have to say that was a huge plus for me).

Google and DoubleClick - what does it mean for PPC?

2008-03-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

Google closed it's acquisition with DoubleClick today. So what does it mean for Pay Per Click?
As Google continues to grow we are seeing the search marketing trend pull away from being just that: Search Marketing. With the introduction of image ads being placed on the content network (now placement targeting) and the addition of video ads, radio ads, newspaper advertising, etc. Google continues to stray away from being a search marketing network to an online marketing network.
Some say that Google took off when they revolutionized search by introducing the linking algorithm in order to bring it's users the most relevant results possible. I would say that the company itself experienced a growth when they revolutionized the online advertising industry by offering ads that were charged on a per click basis rather than a cost per impression. This new way of advertising made it easier and more affordable for small businesses to gain a presence on the internet without breaking their budgets.
Banner ads are now becoming a part of that revolution. I have already seen the results of this form of advertising on Google with the placement targeting campaigns. I am able to pick and choose where my ads appear rather than a plethora of pages. By choosing the specific pages that our ads are to appear I am able to bring the users from an article, blog posting, website, etc. that relates to a specific user with a banner ad that when clicked brings the user to a page which then presents them with a document or such information relating to what they were in the mindset for.
By doing this, there is less of a fall-out from the banner ads themselves and thus creating more conversions.
The user is presented with what they are looking for or researching more efficiently, and the company was able to get yet another lead.
It's a win/win situation!

Google Groove - San Jose, CA

2008-03-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

The the moment we walked in I was in awe. In all the years I have worked in SEO I have never been to a Google party. I had heard about them, and how much fun the are, but haven't ever experienced it all first hand.
I ran into Carlos who had worked for me at Visible Technologies all those years ago. It was great to catch up and find out that he is doing really well. He is on his own now running his own consulting company specializing in Landing pages for PPC. Jeff Leach had attended with me, we have both stayed in touch over the years as he continues to grow his own consulting business managing those hard to reach Linking campaigns and creating great successes in optimizing for the most aggressive terms as always.

I have been struggling with finding a consulting company that is able to handle our European campaigns including the translation and localization as well as our US campaigns. I had met a couple of guys from the UK that were specializing in handle such campaigns and swapped cards with them.

I also ran into these guys -

The night continued to be a blast as we all stacked our glow int he dark cups while we slammed down the beers before they closed down the open bar at 10:00pm.

Check out their Video on YouTube

Inside AdWords: Meet our AdWords Evangelist in San Jose

2008-02-23T12:02:00.000-08:00

Inside AdWords: Meet our AdWords Evangelist in San Jose

Since I have made the change from Classmates.com natural SEO Manager now working for Concur Technologies as a full search marketer, I am making he trip to Jan Jose for the SMX West conference next week.
My goal is to absorb as much as I can about search marketing for B2B, as well as learning more about managing campaigns overseas. Our search marketing has been very successful here in the US and with the company now expanding to Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA) I am now driving our search marketing efforts there. My main focus has been in the UK, but now moving to Germany, and France as well. Our Australia campaigns have been struggling quite a bit, so am hoping to eventually focus my efforts there and gain some ground.
It's great to see that Google is going to be there, and am excited to get to pick their brains. Especially Fred Vallaeys AdWords Evangelist.

See you there!

Jenn

Remove URL from the Google Index

2008-01-10T13:38:00.000-08:00

There has been repeated discussion about how and why you should remove a URL (whether it a whole website, directory or just one file) from the Google index.
The most common issue I have ran into is when two or more domains resolve to the same DNS resulting in more than one website with the exact same pages and content in the google index. I discuss this in one of my earlier posts "Problems with Multiple Domains".

Matt Cutts has presented us with a video explaining more scenarios and the best practices of how to remove URLs from the Google index even more in depth.

Ha! to all you Linking black hatters...

2007-12-02T00:46:00.000-08:00

You know I have been talking about is for several years now. Back when I started as a full time SEO technician several years back, the company I worked for used linking as their main strategy for rankings. While they obtained the rankings quickly, the search engines slowly started catching up to all those websites that used such sites at linkmarket, and linkworth in order to increase their rankings. Funny thing is that now I get to tell them "I told you so".

Does this mean that Google doesn't approve of linking? By all means, NO... Google supports linking in every way, in fact they encourage website owners to encourage external links in order to help their rankings. What they don't approve of is the purchasing of links in order to iuncrease rankings.

The point of rankings within the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to help the user find what they are looking for efficiently. If a website has next to no relevant content and has rankings just because of a load of external links is that helping the user find what they need?

No

If the website has relevant content to what the user is looking for, then chances are the user isn't only going to find what they need, but the user is going to be so excited about the site that they are going to either blog it, or tell others about the site by adding a link to it.

This was the whole basis to Google's algorithms from the beginning. The problem is that SEO people have been using black hat techniques in order to increase rankings quickly (linking, doorway pages, duplicate content, etc) leaving Google and the other search engines having to adjust the algorithms in order to bring the most relevant results.

When optimizing a website, always be sure to provide your user with relevant content, and landing pages that reflect what each user would be looking for. For example, if someone is looking to start dating online they would want a website that offers advice for those wanting to date online. Thus when a user types in "Online Dating Advice" They would find a website and a webpage that reflects the online dating advice - such as: Buy You a Drink.

Google talks more about this and Matt also adds a bit about how Google made some algorithmic changes recently which resulted in a lot of websites loosing pagerank and search results - Purchasing Links is a BAD -

Read it and memorize it well...

Always remember that if you have to adjust because your site lost rankings, then you aren't optimizing correctly.

Google snippets

2007-11-27T09:26:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts visited us here in Seattle by heading to Google Kirkland office. They had decided to make a few videos of Matt while he was there and post it to the Google Webmaster Blog - Anatomy of a Search Result. Matt's video explains the snippets (title and description that shows up in your search results). He used Starbucks as an example. The Starbucks site is a good one since it has limited content on the page, but uses meta descriptions in their code.

Matt mentioned in the video that we have no control over the site links presented underneath the snippet which isn't entirely true. While we are unable to pay for the extra sitelinks within the snippet, we are able to control them through the webmaster tools. Under the "links" and then "sitelinks" within webmaster tool, if Google has generated sitelinks for your website, you are able to control them from there.

Always remember how the snippet works:

If the search term is within the meta description of the web page then the description will appear in the snippet (with the term highlighted in bold).

If the term isn't in the meta description or there isn't a meta description then the words around the content within the body of the page will be displayed (with the term highlighted in bold).

If the page does not have content and does not have a meta description, then the description is generally pulled from the open directory project

If there isn't any content on the page, no description in the meta tags, and the site hasn't been submitted to the open directory project then the descriptiontion will be blank.

A great example of the fourth scenario is a client I have been working on that came to me with his website that was created entirely in graphics. The website was a great design, and had a lot of great information on it, but the text was put in images and placed on the site that way. The website wasn't even ranking for the name. The only way to pull it up int he results was to do a site: search to see that the pages were getting indexed, but the content wasn't getting recognized (because of the images).

I am currently in the process of pulling out the text from the images and the html is recoded to keep the design the same while keeping the text still recognizable. I also added a webmap for more efficient indexing, and landing pages for the terms that the client wanted to rank for. There is an xml sitemap submitted to the webmaster tools, and a Google analytics account setup for tracking conversions.
The client should start to see better results soon after we get the new site launched.

Classmates is getting rankings

2007-11-20T00:07:00.000-08:00

I was asked for the Classmates.com address the other day and since I hadn't been there in a while I went to Google and typed "classmates renton". I was surprised to see that registration form page for the "classmates test high school"
I hate to say this but the fact that tis page is ranking is wrong on so many levels.
From a usability standpoint - most people looking for the classmates address (such as myself) while Google ha it on the map, to see this page i the results is very confusing. How many of these pages are ranking? I have come across the final form page on several occasions while searching schools, or other such affiliations (researching schools for the kids). The problem is that a user coming to this page for any other reason than to sign up for classmates.com is very confused as to what they should do. This page is meant to be the last in a 5 page registration process in which a user starts from www.classmates.com and then flows through to the school they attended when they graduated. I had mentioned this while the SEO Manager at classmates.com but they chose to keep the pages as is, and decided not to make the fix in order to get the actual landing pages that we had designed and launched in December 2006. The pages were designed to recognize who would be landing on these pages, give the user a clear understanding as to why they were there, and what we would like them to do once there (The target audience, value proposition, and call to action). Those pages went from a 10% conversion rate (that's being nice) to a 50% to often 60% conversion rate.
It's a shame that the registration form page is ranking higher than the intended landing page.

The second reason why it's a bad thing to see this page listed is that the page is the test high school that the QA department uses in order to ensure there are no bugs in the registration process.
If it were me, I would remove it from the index through the webmaster tools, and then add it to the robots.txt to ensure that it wouldn't ever rank again.

Maybe even suggest that we not let it go to prod, and leep it on the QA servers just for testing.

The Shiny Red Button

2007-11-02T18:19:00.001-07:00

You have all at some point heard me talking about my ideal website. If not, I'll describe that perfect website once again. You see, us marketing folks want to keep things as simple for the user as possible. A clear call to action on the page in which the user knows exactly what to do within seconds of the page loading.

So what is the clearest call to action imaginable? Why it's a shiny red button.

So my ideal website would be one that has a simple red button with nothing else. Big - shiny - and RED

Us marketing folks joke from time to time by saying we should add elements to this shiny red button. Like a call to action in words such as "click here" or possibly using a bit of psychology and adding "don't" to the "click here".

But then what is the value proposition on a page with a shiny red button? Could it be the button itself?

What does the button do?
How do you market the button to drive visitors to it?

All of these questions and more will be answered in time.
In the mean time take a moment to visit the Shiny Red Button - send it to a friend, and watch the button and all the marketing aspects change over time.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

2007-08-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

Great for Promotions!

Now Google offers the feature to add a meta tag that tells googlebot when your page is going to expire. While at Classmates.com we would launch promotions on a regular basis in which landing pages and SEO were passed up because the PPC would be too expensive to run for such a short time, and we didn't want to run risk of the page ranking later when the promotion was finished.

SEO Similar Content case study

2007-08-15T10:23:00.000-07:00

In April 2007 I attended the SES in New York and took part in a duplicate content discussion panel. The panel talked about the usual content issues such as shingles, duplicate content, boiler plate, etc.
At Classmates I was working on a project that was one page design in which it had dynamically fed content resulting in over 40 million dynamically generated pages. The goal was to individually optimize these pages so that they would act as landing pages when a person were to search a specific word that was located in our database.
I spoke with the people on the panel and asked them how they would resolve the duplicate content issues on so many dynamically generated pages. They suggested setting up a system in which we could add content to the page individually, and just take on a few each week until they all had unique content. The problem with that was that we didn't have the man power to do this for over 40 million pages. The pages were user generated (meaning the user filled out the information for each specific page) and exposing the user content was against the privacy policy and also against our business model leaving the possibility of allowing the user generated content to be visible by the search engines in order to make the pages unique.

So back to square one - when the experts can't help you, what do you do?

So I went back to work after the conference and presented the dilemma to my copywriter. We started talking about duplicate content issues and how we can avoid the content getting filtered out with boilerplate content. Then I thought - "what breaks up the content for each shingle? Is it the code, punctuation, or all of the words counted without code or punctuation?"

So I decided to run a test case against the question...

We took one block of copy that didn't make sense and added a 3 word phrase not common in the english language to optimize the copy for that word. Then applied it to 3 different basic html pages (no css, no skin, no javascriptiing of any kind, etc)

Page 1 - the first page was the copy with the punctuation removed not a single quote, period, or comma as one solid paragraph surrounded by paragraph tags.
Page 2 - the second page was the same paragraph as is without the punctuation that was originally in the content broken up with heading, paragraph, and break tags.
Page 3 - the third page was the paragraph with the punctuation in it as it was originally written and surrounded in whole by paragraph tags.

Links to all three pages were added to the home page of a site that has been in existence for 5 years. They were titled "page 1", "page 2" and "page 3" so that they weren't swayed by the anchor text of the link.

It took a little over a week for the pages to show up in the Google index with Yahoo and MSN trailing by 4-6 weeks. Page 3 showed up first while page 1 showed up in the index shortly thereafter. When searching for the term that the pages were optimized for, Page 3 received rankings while page 1 did not show up. Page 2 was never indexed on Google or MSN, but did show up on Yahoo eventually.

After 3 months of page 2 not showing up in the index I changed page 2 and added punctuation in random places. The punctuation was in different places than page 3, and I removed the heading, paragraph, and break tags.

Just a few days after making the changes page 2 started showing up in the search results for the same term, and not as a supplement result. It was a unique ranking all it's own.

The result is that the search engines use punctuation to break up the content. So when optimizing a dynamic page that will create many dynamic generated pages it's good to use bullet points while keeping your sentences short, and adding the dynamic content as much as possible (without being too repetitive).

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

2007-08-13T22:35:00.000-07:00

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

What is malware?

Malware is a software that tracks your moves online and feeds that information back to marketing groups so that they can send you targeted ads.

Malware can be downloaded with you even knowing by playing online games, downloading software that includes it and they don't inform you, etc. that install the software that tracks your every move.

Most of the malware installed will show you random pop-up ads but some peoples' computers slow down or even crash. The malicious software will use peoples' personal information and abuse it.

Google will now show you results in the search engine result page (SERP) that will warn you if a website uses malware. Some site owners don't even realize that something on their website has malware on it, so they are letting webmaters know through the Google webmaster tools if they have malicious software etc. on their site so they they can remove it.

I always love to see the user coming first when it comes to websites and search engine optimization and this is another great way that Google is helping the webmaster optimize the website, and pay attention to the user.

Problems with multiple domains

2007-08-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of websites and companies that buy up multiple domains in order to try and corner the market and weed out the competition. While at Classmates.com I found a long list of domains that the company owned, some of which were parked, and others were resolving to the same DNS as the www.classmates.com domain. The problem with the multiple domains pointing to the same DNS for SEO is that the search engines view this as an exact match down to the same directory and filename, as well as the content on the page. The result in the end is that one or more of the domains could be banned or even penalized for being the same.

I ran into the same issue with the professional womens organization - the original domain was www.pwoo.org which was later changed to wwww.professionalwomenonline.com. The www.pwoo.org domain was used when I was quoted in articles and marketing publications, so I wanted those who came from there to still arrive to the same site even though the domain changed. With the two domains pointing ot the same site, I struggled with ranking issues due to links, and duplicate content. So I removed the www.pwoo.org domian from the Google index so that it won't obtain rankings anymore. The www. professionalwomenonline.com domain is now getting great rankings and the users who type in www.pwoo.org can still see the same site.

How did I resolve the issue?
Google has a great addition to their webmaster tools in which you can remove files, directories, and even whole domains. By removing one of the domains from the index, the other can be left to obtain rankings without resulting in being blacklisted. The only problem is that you have to have the pages 404 (page does not exist) in order for the domain to be removed.

Back up your files on a computer or separate server and remove them all (just temporarily)
Go to your Google webmaster tools and select the site you wish to choose (if you don't have a site setup in the Google webmaster tools I would advise creating an xml sitemap and setting up an account today)
From your webmaster tools site dashboard select the "URL Removals" for your website
Click the "New Removal request"
In this case you want to select " Your entire site Remove your site from appearing in Google search results."
Confirm by clicking the " Yes, I want to remove this entire site."
The site is then added fore removal.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Supplemental goes mainstream

2007-07-31T19:00:00.000-07:00

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Supplemental goes mainstream

You know I have been an advocate of natural search landing pages. With Google's technology n supplemental results aligned with natural search optimization and marketing for usability a user that searches say Annville Institute, Annville, Kentucky (KY) on Google will see:
Annville Institute, Annville, Kentucky (KY)
Ever find yourself wondering what happened to so-and-so from Annville Institute in Annville, KY? Perhaps you’re trying to get in touch with one of your best ...

In the search results - which then takes the user to a page that is more relevant to what they are looking for than the standard www.classmates.com homepage.

This also helps projects like the buyyouadrink.org profiles so that users can share what information they want when Googlers search their name in order to find out more about them through their own personal profile pages.

Back to the Basics of SEO #2 - Black Hat SEO

2005-09-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

Black-Hat Techniques

When you look at how the search engines go about finding relevant websites when a certain word, or phrase is typed in, it can be fairly simple to trick that system into finding your website before anyone else's.

These techniques are generally called “Black-Hat Techniques”. They can range anywhere from doorway pages to hidden text, and more.

Some Black-Hat Techniques are:

Artificial Traffic – Artificial traffic systems are setup to hit your website with different IP addresses several times a day. The theory is that the more traffic that comes to your site, the more popular it is. So, by hitting your website website several times a day with different IP's, the search engine's see this as many people visiting your website every day. - In the end driving up your rankings with the search engines.

Why is this bad?

In the constant battle to weed out the good from the bad, search engines have been developed to recognize the programs used to generate artificial traffic. So, while it may work in the meantime in generating better rankings, in the long run you may end up getting penalized, or even banned by one or more of the search engines.

Cloaking Scripts – essentially outwits the search engines to increase your listings, and increase your traffic. Search engines spiders go to each site, follow every link, and index what they find in the engine's results. Cloaking Scripts automatically generate thousands of pages just for the spiders. These pages are usually dynamically built from keyword lists not available to the user.

Why is this bad?

Cloaking scripts are generally unreadable, or even have hidden text (text that is the same color of the webpage background, or hidden by some other feature such as an image, table or div), or redirecting scripts (scripts that send the visitor to the actual website from the cloaking page when the visitor runs their mouse over something, or with the click of a button and/or link within the cloaking page). The whole point of the search engines is to find legitimate content and quality websites for visitors to see. If they can't see the content on the page, or are redirected to a different page, that webpage is essentially thrown out as a quality website.

Doorway Pages - Doorway pages are usually developed as a page that is spider friendly for the user to see that generates rankings, and then redirects the visitor to the actual website. Doorway pages are created to do well for particular phrases. They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names. Doorway pages can be used for sites that aren't getting indexed (usually a site developed with frames, or dynamically driven), or they can be completely different domains that direct traffic to the actual website. For example, a lawyer might create a specific website with a doorway page for divorce law, and another one for criminal law, and another one for personal injury law. All three websites are optimized for each specific term, and then redirect to the original website that holds more information about that law firm.

Why is this bad?

Doorway pages do not have any significant content, and only have one or possibly two pages to the site. While they may have links to the site, the content may be the exact same as the original site, and all will link to one another. Search engines view this as spamming them (or tricking), and will eventually either penalize all of the websites, or completely ban them altogether.

Duplicate or Similar Content – In an effort to generate more content quickly, webmasters will sometimes create multiple pages, or even multiple websites, and then simply place the exact same content on each page with different keywords worked in.

Why is this bad?

Search engines can see this as spam. When a website has duplicate content it is either viewed as sheer laziness, or in breech of another's copyrights. In the end, the website that was created originally may not get penalized (generally looking at the older website, or how long a website has been live) though the newer websites will start to drop in rankings as a result.

While the search robots may simply be computers, and computers are only as smart as the ones that created them, search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo spend all of their time, and energy from a staff made of those holding PhD's in computer science, mathematics, and more working on optimizing the search tools, and outsmarting those who create websites, and those who work on optimizing websites to find “ the most comprehensive search” on the web . In the end, the PhDs are most likely to win.

While the search engines may not be able to pick up on these black hat techniques, they may have a little help from users, or even your competitors. Each one of the major search engines (Yahoo, Google, and MSN) all have a form to fill out when it comes to websites that spam. Each and every website is the researched thoroughly, and all that are involved may potentially be penalized as well. So, be wary of those that you link to, and techniques that search marketing companies may use.

Link Farms – The more links you have pointing to your website, the better chance you have of getting a ranking. Although they aren't as around as much as they have been in the past link farms promise to place your link on other websites for a fee.

Why is this bad?

Link Farms often link your page with Web sites that have nothing to do with your content. The repercussions of this action are that the major search engines penalize sites that participate in link farming, thereby reversing their intended effect. A Link Farm usually places your link on a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites.

Where to report spammers:

Google - http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Yahoo - http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam

Alta Vista - http://www.altavista.com/help/contact/search

Yahoo Copyright reporting –

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/copyright/copyright.html

What are Meta Tags?

2003-09-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

What are Meta Tags?

The common question out on the SEO circuit is Meta tags or no Meta tags. Some argue that meta tags are useless. But are they really useless? The answer is no. In fact, back in the golden days of SEO (1990's) meta tags were the only way any website would have ever been seen. If you wanted your website to show up on MSN, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, or any other popular search engine at the time, if you didn't have the proper meta tags, then your website was virtually hidden from the world.

As search engines became the more popular way to find what you were looking for on the internet, and the internet itself began to grow into this immense Â“pot of knowledgeÂ”, and resources, search engines had to find a way to find all of those websites available on the internet and lump them in an organized easy to access source for users to find what they need. By typing in a word or phrase that describes what you were looking for, the more results you found, the more you would return to that search engine in order to find what you were looking for.

So, the search engines found a way to find websites, and pull the keywords from those websites if there were no meta tags available. The more a word or phrase was found within the content of a website, the higher a website would show up for that word or phrase. The more another site would have the same word, the higher that site would appear, and so on.

Along came Google, with their page ranking system which changed the direction of SEO completely. Search engine optimizers began focusing on getting links to their sites. So much so, that they forgot about the meta tags altogether. Some SEO individuals are so obessesed with the google page ranking system, and obtaining links to their sites that they get involved with links farms, and cross linking, which inevitably will get a website banned from Google or Yahoo.

So, what happened to the meta tags?

They are still there, and are as important as the day they were ever thought up.

In fact, Google and Yahoo both place emphasis on how important it is to have proper meta tags. Yahoo even lists out that proper meta tags are important when optimizing a website, and details how to create proper meta tags (click here to read more). Does this mean that your site won't be seen if you don't have meta tags? Not necessarily. But, your site won't be highlighted for the words, or phrases, that you would like the people that search those phrases to find you. In fact, you will find that some phrases are so popular they are searched several hundred, if not several thousands of times a day.

So, by choosing the right keywords, and properly placing them in your meta tags, and efficiently wording your description, you will find that not only will you show up ahead of your competition for the words that are getting searched, but that the one who searched that phrase might be lured to your link in the results more so than your competition because of your title, and meta tag description.

Meta tags should be placed in the head of the HTML document, between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

Expires

The date and time after which the document should be considered expired - such as a news article, or marketing promotional landing page.

Controls cacheing as web robots may delete expired documents from a search engine, or schedule a revisit.

Dates must be given in GMT. E.g. format(META tag):

<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 26 Feb 1997 08:21:57 GMT">

or (HTTP header):

Expires: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 08:21:57 GMT

Pragma

Controls cacheing - the value must be "no-cache".


<META value="no-cache" >

Content-Type

The meta content type may be extended to give the character set.


<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-2022-JP">

It is recommended to use this tag failure to do so may cause display problems.

Content-Script-Type

i.e.


<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Script-Type" CONTENT="text/javascript">

Specifies the default scripting language in a document.

Content-Style-Type

i.e.


<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Style-Type" CONTENT="text/css">

Specifies the default style sheet language for a document.

Default-Style

Set the document's preferred style sheet, taken from a stylesheet specified elsewehere e.g. in a LINK element.

Content-Language

Used to set the natural language of the document. Used
by robots to categorize by language. The corresponding Accept-Language
header (sent by a browser) causes a server to select an appropriate
natural language document.
i.e.


<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="en-US">

or (HTTP header)


Content-language: en-US

languages are specified as the pair (language-dialect); here, English United States

Set-Cookie

Sets a "cookie" along with a value with an expiry date are
considered "permanent" and will be saved to disk on exit.

i.e.


<META HTTP-EQUIV="Set-Cookie" CONTENT="cookievalue=xxx;expires=Friday, 31-Dec-09 23:59:59 GMT; path=/">

PICS-Label

Platform-Independant Content rating scheme. Typically used to
setva document's rating in terms of adult content (sex, violence, etc.)
although the scheme is very flexible and may be used for other purposes.

Cache-Control

Specifies the action of cache agents. Possible values:

Public - may be cached in public shared caches
Private - may only be cached in private cache
no-cache - may not be cached
no-store - may be cached but not archived

Robots

Controls web robots on a per-page basis.
i.e.


<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

Robots may spider this page but not index it.

Most search bots support:

NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed and ranked

NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages

NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed

NOARCHIVE extension to request that the search engine not cache the pages content

Description

A short, plain language description of the document. Used by search
engines to describe your document. Particularly important if
your document has very little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts
at the top.
i.e.


<META NAME="description" CONTENT="describe your website or page here">

Keywords

Keywords used by search engines to index your document in addition to
words from the title and document body. Typically used for synonyms
and alternates of title words.
i.e.


<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="oranges, lemons, limes">

Author

Typically the author's name.
i.e.


<META NAME="author" CONTENT="Your Name">

Copyright

Typically a copyright date a company or website name
i.e.


<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="2009 company name">

Google Specific

tags specific to Google onle
i.e.


<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="noarchive">

googlebot: noarchive - do not allow google to display cached content

googlebot: nosnippet - do not allow google to display excerpt or cached content

googlebot: noindex - similar to the robots meta element

googlebot: nofollow