WebWatching

Gone from Google - a sickening thought…and it happens…and thousands of dollars in profits disappear from a web business overnight.   Google changes their algorithm and decides some site is no longer worthy…maybe a site that has been worthy for five years or more! 

Google’s obligation is the quality of the search results.  No doubt about…but let’s face it…Google is dependent on the content on the Web.  In fact it is the opportunity that Google has provided that has led to so many hundreds of thousands of real web sites (yes and maybe even more Spam sites).

But what about that site that is deemed no longer worthy?   Doesn’t Google owe something to that site?  An explanation? Some help?  Shouldn’t there be some transparency to what is happening to a site?

Why should a domain change penalize a site?  It does and is well documented.  I am working on a site that is changing it’s domain name for branding reasons.  The site is likely to lose traffic for six months.  Is there anywhere to turn for help at Google?   Uhh…nope!

Hey - I love Google and Google has give me and so many a career.  But with all the money they are raking in…they should be able to help websites…at least websites with proven popularity and longevity.

I have said previously that PR=PR. What do I mean by that? Publicity is the best thing that can happen to your SEO efforts. That will bring you links….and the subsequent PageRank. Just imagine what it means to get your site slashdotted or digged in the era of Blogs. References to your site will spread around the Internet faster than the document shredders at Anderson destroyed their Enron accounting secrets! How to do this:

• Solve a problem better than anyone else
• Do Web 2.0….but do it to solve a problem. Use AJAX in a way it hasn’t been used yet.
• Do something fun…something edgy that may draw attention to an otherwise mundane site. Think subservient chicken! (Yahoo lists 31,000 links to subservientchicken.com!)
• Submit your site to blogs that monitor Web 2.0. These blogs are looking for things to write about every day. Make their day!

The biggest thing you can do for your SEO program is build a great site that people love…give your SEO consultant something to work with and they can bring a ton of traffic your way!

You can’t help but come across blog posts and threads declaring the death of PageRank. This stuff is just plain silly and dead wrong. I spend many hours optimizing sites with thousands of pages and it is clear and easy to see that PageRank is a dominating factor. OffPage factors is what differentiated Google from the beginning and I can’t see that changing. Why do people make these assertions?

The innaccuracies of the toolbar is certainly one of the reasons. The toolbar is just a snapshot in time and is only updated quarterly. So when they are saying PageRank does not matter - they are trying to say to ignore the toolbar. For the most part that is true. But that does not mean that the underlying concepts behind PageRank are not in play.

For an individual keyword, the most dominating factor is anchor-text from an external domain, not PageRank. This has been the case for along time. So you might see a PR5 site kick the butt of a PR7 site for a specific keyword. “See PageRank is dead”! Somebody will say. Anchor text is a great way to get traffic for a specific keyword, but it does not scale. Anchor text is not going to get you traffic to your 10K product catalog because you are not going to get links to each product in your catalog. It is PageRank that is going to make those pages work (with on-page optimization of course).

Other times people will point to an obscure search like “Elephants eat tomatoes” and a PR3 page leading the results and say again “PageRank is dead”. Nope - low competition is the reason for listing like that. Low competitive searches on the tail do not need much PageRank.

You need PageRank to get results for medium competitive keyword phrases. Very competitive keywords need both PageRank and links with the right anchor text.

You must have PageRank for deep indexing of your site. Even PageRank monsters like Yahoo have trouble getting their low-page rank pages indexed in Google.

From an optimization perspective, sites can build PageRank from natural and unnatural means. By natural I mean generating buzz and getting other sites and blogs to link to you because of the value of your site. PR = PR!!! You also can manipulate your linking structure so that your most important pages get the most PageRank and your key pages get indexed.

So PageRank is not dead….not yet!

I love the potential of AJAX. The ability to dynamically query and return data to users without forcing a full page refresh can greatly enhance the user experience. A great example is if you use Sidestep to try and book an air flight. See how AJAX is used to help select cities and airports. It is virtually impossible to not find the city or airport you are looking for (disclaimer – I used to work for SideStep). You are prevented from making errors in the first place.

That’s Web 2.0! Compare that to the way Orbitz works. If you make an error you get sent to another page with this error message “An error has occurred while processing this page. Please see detail below. (Message 1500)” . Hmmm-error 1500 – that clears things up! Now that’s Web 1.0 or maybe even 0.1!

So, I love what AJAX can do for the user experience. But those AJAX engineers better be careful…because it is quite easy to develop sites that are essentially invisible to the search engines.

The issue with SEO and Search Engines is this: Search engines create a huge database of WebPages as uniquely identified by their URL. Every page you have in an index is another opportunity to be returned in a search result. If you have a 10,000 product catalog….you want to have a distinct page in Google’s index for each of those products.

Now with Ajax – it is possible to do away with pages. Using JavaScript, programmers can dynamically load content from the server, without loading a new page. The Spiders cannot exercise the JavaScript and cannot see the content. So if you have 10,000 product catalog loaded content via Ajax as opposed to loading a new page when people request a particular product….the spiders won’t see it and of course there will be no search traffic to that content.

As with Flash sites and Frames there are ways around this. Backbase is a company with a pure AJAX site. For browsers (which includes Spiders) that don’t support JavaScript, they redirect to a completely parallel site built without Ajax. You can check this yourself by turning off JavaScript on your browser and going to their site. This is what must be done for any content rendered with AJAX. It is the only way to get your content into the SearchEngine indexes.

Nevertheless…I think we are about to see a whole lot of sites built with invisible content! And a whole lot of SEO consultants will have something new to consult on!!!!!

There is a lot of buzz wrapped around corporate and business blogs and I hear there was a lot of discussion at Search Engine Strategies last week. Last year, Backbone Media did a really interesting survey on business blogging. There are a lot of consultants really excited about corporate blogging. The questions is: is there something to really be excited about or are the consultants and experts excited to have something new to consult on?

Many corporate blogs bore me. They are either too obviously trying to sell their positioning or too obviously trying to sound sincere about their desire to make the world a better place with their amazing technology (when all they are doing is trying to position themselves to get acquired by Google!!!). The thing is, if a company is truly excited about what their product can do for their customers…it will come through.

There are many challenges to create a good corporate blog. How hard are the corporate execs and board of directors reading each post…how much scrutiny? The more internal focus on a blog - the less open and sincere the blog will sound. If the posts sound like Press Releases…not good!

What are the objectives of the blog? What readers does it want to attract? A blog aimed at giving useful information to customers and providing a place for discussion is very different than a blog aimed at generating buzz. A blog needs focus. You popularize a blog by finding the right neighborhoods to hang out in - different objectives means different neighborhoods!

A couple of corporate blogs I like include Hitwise and SimplyHired. Hitwise, a data analytics company provides glimpses of the data they make available to their customers. It is interesting (to geeks like me who like numbers) and provides an indication of the value they can give to customers. SimplyHired is funny and gets away with promoting themselves because they are so irreverent and they take themselves lightly. However the posts have become too sporadic. One thing with blogs, is you need to keep a steady stream of posts (something I struggle with myself).

Can blogging make a substantial difference for a business? The right blog can get the right people listening, paying attention and discussing your company- customers or industry experts (or both). (SEO and inbound links are nice benefits as well!) The key is focus and pro-actively evolving and promoting the blog by plugging into the blogosphere…finding the right blogging neighborhoods, contributing, linking! Oh yeah…it better be interesting.

On-page optimization is basically easy. The weighting of different factors hasn’t changed that much since the demise of meta-tags and really shouldn’t. If it is visible - it is important! The more visible…the more important. Thus, titles are most heavily weighted. Headings - still important. The earlier text shows up, the more important. Larger text - more important. Repeated text = more important!!!! Text shows up as hyper links get extra benefit as well. Engines like Google are trying to rate a page like a human would.

On the other hand - the less visible text is - the less important. Meta-keywords are not important. Alt-text - probably does not matter anymore because it is not visible. Meta-descriptions - not important for rankings (but still important because it shows up in the search results).  I still put in meta-keywords and alt-text - just to cover my bases.
As for keyword density rules - I don’t follow them (nobody knows the magic number). The advice I got early on is this; integrate your target keywords as much as you can, as prominently as you can…with the page still sounding natural when you read it aloud. That way it is good for your users and good for the search engines. It works.
Really…this is the easy part of SEO….there are no secrets. I am knee deep in SEO right now…so I’ll probably be focusing a bit on SEO in my next few posts. I haven’t even had time to get started on my Ruby Plan…maybe this weekend.

Titles are the key to generating search traffic to your blog (or any web page for that matter). I’ve written before on why Blogs do so well in the search engines. I use Wordpress for this blog, a fantastic open-source blogging platform with literally thousands of plugins. Wordpress is particularly SEO friendly. If you look at one of my individual post pages, you will see my titles lead with the heading of the post and not the name of my blog. There is a Wordpress plugin I used to modify the standard behavior and this is far more effective then the default behavior. The post heading also clickthrough to the post page - enhancing the keyword relevance of the words in the heading and title.

Choosing a title is a balancing act between creating something catchy and exciting that will generate clickthroughs as well as bring the particular readers you want to find your blog.

I recently wrote about Kosmix, a new search engine with an interesting twist on ranking results. So certainly, when people search for Kosmix, I want them to find and read my post. Of course, ‘Kosmix’ goes is in the title. Since this is a new blog, I have a relatively small amount of PageRank and therefore will have a tough time with a top ranking for a single word. So I make sure to put in my title a couple of keywords relevant to Kosmix. They have a couple of new concepts called ‘category rank’ and ‘auto-tagging’. So I merged those into the title as well. So guess what, if you search on ‘category rank’, I am number 1 in Google - and high up for a variety of searches such as ‘Kosmix auto-tagging’. ‘Kosmix Rankings’.

In another post I wrote about Google Analytics. Now, Google Analytics is a brutally competitive keyword. It already shows up in the title of 121,000 web pages. Since my post was a comparison with NetTracker, I put that in the title. With those words in the title and a few other analytics products mentioned on the page….I show up in the top 5 for a variety of searches:

• Google vs NetTracker
• Google analytics comparison
• Google analytics vs. ominiture
• Google analytics vs. webtrends

Note that I get results for Webtrends and Omniture even though they are not in the title…the title content works in conjunction with the additional content on the page.

You also want to know what keywords people use when they search. A tool like Wordtracker is excellent in doing this type of analysis.

So pay attention to your titles and you will gain much greater visibility in the search engines….just don’t steal my titles!!!

Well…the blog is 2 months old and I have yet to mention Web 2.0. Truth be told…I have been afraid that as soon as I jumped on the bandwagon, everyone else would be jumping off and onto Web 3.0! And yes I have Web 2.0 envy…I want to be writing one of those lean, mean, tagging mashup machines ….the read write Web! Scrub those Taxonomies clean with Ajax and transform them into Folksonomies!

So it’s one to Ruby on Rails for me, I’ll be burning the midnight oil because I too have some fantastic ideas just waiting to be Web2.0ified. Google and Yahoo are going to be banging at my door for sure! Oh yeah…first I’ll have to write some code and i admit I haven’t written a line in anger in almost 10 years (save for some pitiful HTML). So we will see if this works out! Fortunately, they way I understand, Ruby practically writes itself….and since all I think I can budget is about 90 minutes a day I will need all the help I can get.

Techcrunch….here I come!!!!!

I love OpenSource and WordPress is a good example why. WordPress is the blogging platform I use for this blog. There are over 600 custom themes available and you can swap in a new one with a few clicks. Even better, there is a huge collection of plugins which you can use to customize the functionality of your blog - the ‘now reading’ section in my sidebar is an example. I can go into my Admin, enter a book name and the plugin will find the book image and link on Amazon (and stick in an affiliate code as well). I have also used a Plugin for SEO friendly titles and anti-spam plugins.

It’s users who write these features for OpenSource products, not marketers or product managers desperately trying to project a killer feature on their user. These users are driven to create features and plugins late at night and weekends. They do it because the feature is important to them and solves a particular problem or need. The same thing cannot be said for all features that come from product managers, marketing VPs and CEOs  (although it should be). Moreover, many of these plugins will pertain to a small minority of users and would never get written in a commercial environment.
So now I am writing in Wordpress, browsing with FireFox, listening to music on my Squeezebox with the OpenSource Slimserver, learning to write web apps with Ruby on Rails, helping a friend build an online store with OSCommerce, learning how to PodCast with Audacity and playing Civilization (well…I had to buy something!)

I remember the days when I wanted to learn Unix and C++ on my PC. This was an expensive proposition. SCO XENIX was close to a thousand dollars. The world was different…and I don’t want to go back to that world!!!! Long live OpenSource!

Blogs entries are occupying more and more real estate in the search engine results. Certainly for anybody paying attention this is no surprise. Hence you see many companies starting up corporate blogs to take advantage of this (which I will dive into a bit later). Why are the search engines filled with so many blog results?

1. Blog posts are text heavy. Every sequence of words is an opportunity to show up in the search results. The more text, the more potentially unique or lightly used sequence of words. Combine this with fact that the average searcher is tending to use longer and longer search phrases and there are simply more opportunities for blog entries.
2. Unique Titles - Most blogging platforms create unique titles based on the post title. The title is then reinforced by the post heading. Of course the text in the article relates to the title and reinforces the subject matter as well.
3. Fresh Content - New pages in an existing site tend to show up well when they first appear in the results and then drop. People like fresh content. So does Google.
4. Easy navigation paths to the content. Blogs tend to have easy navigation to archived posts and multiple navigation paths as well (via archive links, categories links, cross links to other recent posts, popular posts). This makes it easy for the Spiders to find and index the content.
5. The titles show up as links to the individual post page throughout must blogging platforms. This brings in the Google concept of “Anchor Text” which is the dominating factor in the Google algorithm…again bringing extreme focus to the keywords in the title of the post.
6. Linking across blogs  is a way of life in the Blogosphere. Good blogs are part of communities with other related blogs. They tend to link to each other, either via citing posts or through blog rolls. They naturally build PageRank and keyword relevance from the anchor text when individual posts are cited.
7. They tend to have simple URL structures which are easy for the search engines to follow. Wordpress has a plugin (which I haven’t yet installed on this Blog) which will use the post Title to construct the URL - again, more focus on the keywords!

If you are blog writer and you want your content to be found, the most important thing you can do is pay attention to is the title. I’ll write more about the subject of choosing a title shortly!