Kansas City SEO and SEM

I’ve been telling my clients for years that WordPress is one of the best SEO blogging software available today. I’ve been challenged many times and I’m really glad Matt Cutts has stated this fact in the below video. Matt also discusses Google’s PageRank and he makes it simple! Thanks @ThatAmy

By: Anne Haynes

The last two weeks I’ve been testing the BuzzStream offsite search engine optimization (SEO) link building management application that is currently in private beta. I feel very privileged to have this opportunity because I know first and second hand how painful link building outreach programs can be when implementing offsite SEO campaigns.

This blog post is designed to educate website owners and agency management how labor intensive SEO outreach programs can be and why using the BuzzStream application will cut cost dramatically. I implement offsite SEO as a website owner and an internet marketing manager at a hosting company, so I have a unique perspective for both readers. In my professional opinion, BuzzStream is becoming the CRM solution for the SEO industry.

Understand that I’m skeptical about finding the easy button to link building and I know how labor intensive link building can be when you obey the White Hat rules of SEO. Many SEO firms created in-house proprietary applications to manage offsite SEO campaigns, but BuzzStream has the ability to plug into any SEO firm, agency or in-house operation.

Six months ago I was researching ranking report software and link management software. I asked the Linkedin SEO group for some help and while I received a ton of answers for ranking report software, there was nothing for link management software. For those people implementing offsite SEO campaigns, you understand my pain. But for those of you that don’t know the interworkings of offsite outreach programs let me spell it out:

First, you have to find websites that compliment your website by querying the search engines with [“list * keyword sites ”] here is a list of search engine queries for link building.

Once you locate a website that looks good you need to make sure the website lives in a good neighborhood; no porn, no excessive advertising, no gambling etc. Each URL you find is entered into the bad neighborhood link building tool and if the site passes the test, it can be added to the offsite optimization spreadsheet. Understand that you could spend anywhere from 20-30 minutes trying to locate “1” good link. But when you find one you feel pretty good the URL made it to the spreadsheet.

This is not your average spreadsheet; following are a few example column headings:
1. Site URL – Easy find cut and paste into spreadsheet and make sure it’s a hyperlink
2. Site Page Rank – You need a toolbar or a web-based tool to gather PR info
3. Site Alexa/Compete Ranking – Enter URL into Alexa.com and cut and past the score into spreadsheet
4. Submission Location – Surf the website to find proper page for the website to be listed
5. Site Owner Name – It could be on the site or you have to go to Whois to find this information if it’s public
6. Site Owner Email – Same as #5
7. Site Owner Phone – same as #5
8. Contact Us URL – Locate this on the site or #5-#7 work instead
9. Date Submitted – This is the date you actually email your request
10. Keyword Meta Variation – Select a different keyword link variation depending on SEO campaign
11. Date Live – You need to check and recheck
12. Date Last Checked – You need to recheck and then check again

As a SEO Specialist working at an agency you’re responsible to collect all the information about the site needed to contact the website owner or webmaster and request a link to the website being optimized. Understand that even if you email a webmaster or owner, there are no guarantee the webmaster will make time for you and add your website. Moreover you’re luck y if you even receive an email back. In my professional opinion a combination of email and phone works best. But again there are no guarantees.

While Google has updated their algorithm to look more at quality links and not quantity, sites that rank really well still have thousands of inbound links. Yes thousands! Now repeat this process over and over, check and recheck to make sure your links have gone live and pray it doesn’t go down without you knowing.

Now let’s say you own a website and you’ve hired an agency to conduct your onsite SEO and offsite SEO. You’re happy with the results, but you’ve decided to bring the SEO in-house, so you request your list of links from the agency. Ok, I’ve worked at agencies and managed search marketing departments; we rarely gave clients the list we built. Many times I’ve seen instructions on how to find your links through emails. Bottom-line, if you search on Google or use Yahoo! Site Explorer you will find your offsite optimization activities. Clients “don’t know what they don’t know” and are pointed to marketleap.com and the search engines to find their offsite SEO activities.

Imagine all of the information above not being given to you. It’s more common than not, so if you outsource your offsite SEO work to an agency make sure you have it “in your contract” that you own the link building “contact” data.

I’m going to continue on this agency theme for a minute. Now let’s say that you manage a search marketing team and you have 40 clients’ offsite optimization strategies distributed among 4 SEO Specialist. One day you come into the office and one of your employees gives two weeks notice. You check over his/her offsite optimization spreadsheet and there is no contact information. You request the information be updated. The employee has to go through his/her email inbox to collect all the information and itemize contact information on a per URL level. With a spreadsheet running at over a thousand rows it will take more than two weeks just to populate the information correctly.

The employee leaves a mess and you assign a seasoned SEO Specialist to take over the work. You ask IT to forward the emails to the new SEO Specialist in charge of the account. The new specialist on the account receives emails from site owners with no context because they didn’t start the relationship in the beginning. The SEO Specialist explains the situation and the cycle starts all over again! Now apply $75 – $125 an hour to that time and put this in your overhead.

For those of you that don’t know this, offsite optimization is one of the most important aspects when ranking in the search engines. Now imagine how many hours this process takes to implement and track. There are many early adopter SEO firms that built in-house applications to improve offsite SEO efficiencies, but BuzzStream is the first application I’ve seen to cover both agency and in-house offsite SEO markets.

I’m grateful to Paul May and the BuzzStream team for building a system to manage these relationships and remove the spreadsheet hell out of offsite optimization. I’ve been using the software for a few weeks and as of today I feel BuzzStream has the ability to be a CRM for offsite SEO.

If you’re insterested in getting you hands on BuzzStream, Follow me on Twitter shout at me to follow and I’ll DM you with a private beta link.

by: Anne Haynes

Today I was checking out my friendfeed and noticed @mattcutts feed talking about an event; Google’s Webmaster Tricks and Treats webinar

This event was a great way to ask Google questions about ranking your websites. As a search marketing specialist I watch SEO trends and consult with other specialist on tactics. What one person says works another person says it won’t work. At times the industry can be confusing. This event allowed webmasters to submit questions to the Google Search team through Google Moderator. The Google Moderator was open a few days before the event, so people could submit questions and other users could rate the questions. The questions with the highest ratings were at the top and had a better chance of being answered. When the event happened today, everyone entered a WebEx session to view presentations and chat with Googlers and other webmasters. After the presentations the Google Moderator was used to answer additional questions. John Mueller’s presentation was my favorite because it focused on shedding light on myths regarding the search engine optimization industry. Following are my notes from the presentation and my thoughts:

Duplication Content
Apparently, duplicate content is not as bad as I thought. The Google team mentioned it’s best to show your best content. However, with this statement I think it states that having 4 pages with the same content is not showing the best content. I’ve wondered why duplicate is a bad thing with Google because Google knows when a page is created based on the creation date, wouldn’t the first page created be the most authoritative? However, as link building and offsite optimization starts I can see how ranking 4 pages with different inbound link values is more complicated. The Google team suggested submitting an XML site map to support Google knowing which pages the site owner wants in the index. So, for those people that think XML site maps don’t help with your overall rankings, you’re wrong.

XML Site Maps
John Mueller stated some believe that XML site maps hurt your rankings. The opposite is true according to John. John mentioned keeping the XML site map up-to-date as being an important factor. At this time @mattcutts mentioned that submitting an XML site map won’t boost your rankings, so it was kind of confusing. Here are my thoughts on XML site maps; why wouldn’t you submit your favorite URLS to Google? Google looks at the XML site map to determine which of your sites pages to rank. There is a reason why keeping them up to date is important – Google accesses your XML site map regularly to rank your pages. And if your XML site map is out of date, then you are confusing the algorithm and making it work harder. Here is an XML site map resource for more information.

PageRank is Dead
Yes, there are SEOs that say PageRank doesn’t matter anymore. John Mueller and the Google team stated PageRank is not dead, it’s just one of the 200 other factors that help a website rank in the search engines. While many webmasters begged for information on the other 199 factors, Googlers wouldn’t play.

Site Submission
SEOs that think resubmitting a site regularly helps with rankings, Google says no. My golden rule is to submit a site when the site has changed substantially. The big question came up about Google recently updated their webmaster guidelines by removing the DMOZ Directory and Yahoo! Direcotry submission recommendations. Matt Cutts, in his own words, mentioned the removal was designed to prevent new webmasters from submitting sites to fly-by-night directories.

If you think you need to submit your website to thousands of search engines in order to rank well, this is a myth as well.

Content Refresh
The next myth John Mueller mentioned; optimize your website and don’t touch it again. For years I’ve been educating clients on the need for fresh content and I’m still doing it today. My approach for this has been to install blogs for the clients to manage and add new content on their own. And let’s face it; clients don’t want to have to pay you forever! Installing blogs has been one of my very best approaches to fresh content.

Shared Hosting
While there may have been a time when having a static IP address would benefit your rankings, Google stated sharing IP addresses is ok because IP addresses are running out. Someone needs to make some more IP address before we need a Government bailout.

I’m not going to talk about how to prevent a URL from being indexed, because a good portion of the event covered this topic, that’s for you @brianrutledge In a few days, everyone can listen to the audio and watch the presentations. If you’re needing help with navigating through all the facets of search engine optimization and making your site friendly to your users and the search engines, check out Google Webmasters Group

One thing that struck me as odd; when the event was taking place there were 200+ questions on the Google Moderator and when the event was over only 28 questions remained. Spooky…

by: Anne Haynes and Twitter SEO Experts

Too many times I’ve seen SEO firms that use underscores or hyphens when constructing websites. So I sent a question to my Twitter network and following is what I received. It seems that us SEOers are all over the map on what works and what doesn’t. When I worked at SEOINC in San Diego, CA I was raised to use hyphens and not underscores. During the early SEO years the hyphen was considered a word separator when programming websites for Google.

In that last few years I’ve noticed the underscore has made a come back. My hat is off to @adamlevenson for finding this pretty SEO article from Matt Cutts on July 23rd 2007, but notice Twitter friend SEM_SEO states if you have underscores don’t go changing (heehee his name has an underscore).

In the CNET article Matt Cutts states that Google’s algorithm is referencing underscores as word separators. Which from a development perspective is developer friendly. I like that Matt Cutts is one of the experts in the SEO industry, but I know there are deep seeded constraints for an internal employee of Google to declare anything from a broadcast level. From a non biased SEOer perspective, it’s about testing and documenting results.

I’d like to see a study on this subject since Matt announced this algorithm enhancement in 2007. It’s been a year since his declaration and well, there have been multiple updates since this announcement. Any takers? Aaron Wall where are you?

Many thanks to the following friends that have helped me navigate through my question!

sem_seo: @AnneHaynes In the last Google webmaster chat they suggested if you have existing underscores don’t change, but going forward use hyphens. (about 6 hours ago)

kevinthompson: @AnneHaynes That used to be the case, but it seems most search engines now interpret both as spaces. I still use hyphens just to be safe. (about 9 hours ago)

adamlevenson: @AnneHaynes Yeah, check this out: News.CNET from AdamLevenson (about 9 hours ago)

gregspradlin: @AnneHaynes Hi Anne, I’ve been told that if given the choice, go with hypens over underscores. (about 9 hours ago)

by: Anne Haynes

I just lost my sitelinks in Google! Damit! I was reading about the algorithm update and I can’t find anything about sitelinks. I’m trying to think of what I’ve done to the site that would affect my sitelinks. I renewed my domain for 9 years yesterday. I couldn’t imagine this hurting my site. I just read up on sitelinks at Google and they are completely automated and it’s based on a site’s link structure. Sitelinks are designed to help people navigate through a website yada, yada, yada. UGH! I want my sitelinks back!

If anyone has some insight, please send me a message.

By: Anne Haynes

Today I watched the Search Marketing Now Blended Search webinar with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor for Search Engine Land. It was a great webinar and cleared up my understanding of the difference between Universal Search and Blended Search; Universal Search is a Google term and Blended Search is everyone else’s term. I prefer Universal Search because it’s all inclusive and has nothing to do with searching for a blender to buy or finding a blended drink recipe.

Sherman goes into the history of search starting with Search 1.0; Boolean logic and keyword matching. During Search 1.0 content was less structured; no video, limited images and no three tier navigation structures. It was the early 90’s when applications like JAWS for the visually impaired were around, but definitely not mainstream or associated to the W3C. This was the time when InfoSeek sold the keyword “Homes” for $100 dollars and Yahoo! founders; David Filo and Jerry Yang interviewed with Dan Fortune; host of Sound Bytes on KSJS. Note: I was the production assistant for the show and it was amazing to meet the masters behind #1 search engine of it’s time. During Search 1.0 days organizations didn’t need Search Engine Optimization firms or specialists; content wasn’t complex. Just add a few keywords and you were #1.

Then the Search 2.0 era started; Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were searching on Yahoo! during their studies at Stanford and started thinking about citing resources in their papers and drew a logical tie to building a search engine based on document citations. Citation analysis is the logic behind Google and the birth of PageRank and TrustRank. During my college days at San Jose State University I remember meeting people in classes, coffee shops, and bars and writing down the word G-O-O-G-L-E. I felt like a bit of a pioneer during those days, but today everyone knows Google, but people are still learning about blogs.

Chris Sherman made 1 or 2 statements on the above, so assume I did the rest. While he never went into a true definition of Search 3.0, the majority of the webinar was around Blended Search.

So let’s dive in – later this week.

by: Anne Haynes

Update: 9AM April 1st 2008
I found the joke this morning on the Official Google Blog site. This years April fools joke is permanent human settlement on Mars.

Googles Virgle Project

10PM March 31, 2008
I’m doing my homework. This is what I get for the term “Google April Fools 2008″
Number 1 rank – previous ranker for the term.

Number 2 rank – Google Operating System.

Number 3 rank – get educated with the wikipedia.org.

Number 5 rank – prediction from the Marketing Pilgrim.

I’ve read this document and it has some good forward thinking about Universal Search and Personalized Search. A post on ReelSEO titled Universal SERPS – Video Results Get Higher Clicks made me think of this study, so I decided to post the paper. Enjoy, it’s a long read.

International Search Engine List

by: Anne Haynes

I watched i-CAUGHT tonight for the first time. While it’s the second episode, it-is-what-it-is: a force to bridge the gap between traditional commercial video producers and “Joe” the online video producer.

One of the i-CAUGHT segments was around the Canadian car thieves. Canada has the secret to finding car thieves by placing cameras within cars. Think of the cars like decoys or dummies; the keys are in the ignition. These camera devices easily help identify criminals stealing cars that area frequently visited on YouTube.

After the episode tonight I decided to conduct a search on Google. It took several queries to find what I was looking for, but the following search term police cameras in canadian cars rendered the first result in Google SERPS.

How much more long-tail can you get?

While the search engines are getting smarter these days (Google) the dynamic query strings within the URL do not help a search engine understanding the meaning of a page. The URL is one of the first variables the spiders visits. And when it sees “?id=3451526&page=1” it’s clueless. Google has updated the algorithm to index dynamic URLs for years now, but it’s obvious that understanding the meaning of a page based on the title tag meta and a friendly URL helps the search engines serve up more relative results.

Come November when Universal Search rolls out prime time, SEO strategies must be udpated to support an organic marketing approach.